[1] In 1916 for his political activities ran afoul of the Okhrana (secret police) and Syrtsov was arrested, expelled from school, and sent into internal exile in the region of Verkolensk in Irkutsk, eastern Siberia.

[4] Syrtsov was an active participant in the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky, heading the local Military Revolutionary Committee in the city of Rostov-on-Don during the revolt.

As a member of the regional military revolutionary committee, he led a punitive expedition against Don Cossacks who opposed the Bolsheviks.

[4] He was a delegate to the 10th Congress of the RKP(b) in March 1921, where he backed Leon Trotsky, against Lenin in the dispute over the role of the trade unions.

[9] Syrtsov's loyalty on the question of collectivization of agriculture was rewarded in 1929 when he was returned from Novosibirsk to Moscow to assume chairmanship of the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian SFSR[10] Syrtsov replaced collectivization opponent Alexey Rykov in this position, and seems to have been tapped to ultimately replacing Rykov as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (CPC) of the entire nation.

[12] He was also made a member of the Council of Labor and Defense (STO), a key economic planning and distribution agency, in July 1929.

The campaign for total collectivization of agriculture in the USSR proved to be dysfunctionally violent, marked by expropriations, forced deportations, and armed revolt.

These excesses moved the decisive and independently minded Syrtsov into opposition, gathering like-minded individuals in the upper ranks of the Communist Party apparatus characterized by historian James Hughes as an "amateurish political plot to oust Stalin" for the violence and economic irrationality.

[15] Syrtsov was replaced as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR by Daniil Sulimov, his successor as secretary of the Urals Oblast Committee of the VKP(b).

Pierre Broué wrote that the bloc most likely dissolved in early 1933, because some of its members were arrested and Kamenev and Zinoviev had joined Stalin again.