to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918. 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. He also participated along with other delegates to the gathering in crushing the Kronstadt Rebellion. This experience moved Syrtsov in a more moderate direction economically, and he became an early and vocal supporter of the New Economic Policy (NEP) advanced by Lenin over radical opposition from within Bolshevik ranks. After the Congress, Lenin intervened to secure Syrtsov's appointment as head of the secretary of the communist party in the Donbas region, against opposition from leaders of the Ukrainian party because of Syrtsov's previous support, which he promised to renounce. National party functionary In 1921 Syrtsov was moved to Moscow to work in the expanding state bureaucracy. He was made head of the Communist Party's Records and Assignments Section (Uchraspred) in July 1921, an institution which was dedicated to the task of maintaining party personnel files. Syrtsov established a system of accumulating individual records on file cards and played a key role in the establishment of the nomenklatura system of appointment of trusted officials to low level office by central authority. Following the appointment of Joseph Stalin as General Secretary in April 1922, Uchraspred's work was carefully supervised by Stalin's Secretariat and a close working relationship between Syrtsov and Stalin was developed for the first time. Syrtsov attended meetings of the party's Organization Bureau (regarded as the bulwark of Stalin's growing factional strength) and participated with Stalin in the appointment of key personnel. The shared agenda of the two in this period was emphasized by the fact that Stalin and Syrtsov shared adjoining offices in the Kremlin. Syrtsov was moved in 1924 to the position of chief of the Central Committee's Agitation and Propaganda department, later becoming a member of the Presidium of the Communist Academy and editor of the VKP(b) Central Committee's magazine, Communist Revolution. Syrtsov became the first secretary of the Communist organization in the Urals district of Siberia in 1926, remaining in that position until 1929. During the grain crisis of 1927–28, Stalin traveled to the region in 1928 to spur lagging grain deliveries to state procurement agencies. Syrtsov was found to be an effective ally of Moscow in the exertion of coercion against the peasantry in what came to