The group's campaign was revealed to Stalin and his group early in the organizing process, just after it had moved from critical commentary in a private group setting to the circulation of anti-Stalin literature and the attempt to attract officials from the Soviet governmental and party apparatus to its cause. Srytsov, Lominadze, Shatskin, and their co-thinkers were expelled from the VKP(b), with the plenum of the CC/CCC moved back to December. This marked the first time that members of these two leading bodies of the VKP(b) were expelled from the party without consent of the Central Committee itself. 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). Arrest and execution Following his expulsion from the Communist Party, Syrtsov went into economic work, managing a munitions plant. In an unknown date, he joined a secret opposition group with Lominadze as well as Jan Sten. This group then joined a larger conspiratorial alliance in 1932 with Leon Trotsky, zinovievists and some unnamed rightists. In a letter from Trotsky's son, they were referred to as the 'Sten–Lominadze group'. 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. Syrtsov was arrested on 19 April 1937 during the Great Purge. Following protracted interrogation he was sentenced to death on 10 September 1937 and executed in Moscow that same day. Syrtsov was posthumously rehabilitated (exonerated) by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on 28 December 1957. Notes References Further reading R.W. Davies, "The Syrtsov-Lominadze Affair," Soviet Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (Jan. 1981), pp. 29–50. In JSTOR Peter Holquist, "'Conduct Merciless Mass Terror': Decossackization on the Don, 1919," Cahiers du Monde russe, vol. 38, no. 1/2(Jan.-June 1997), pp. 127–162. In JSTOR James Hughes, "Patrimonialism and the Stalinist System: The Case of S. I. Syrtsov," Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 48, no. 4 (June 1996), pp. 551–568. In JSTOR T. Szamuely, "The Elimination of Opposition between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Congresses of the CPSU," Soviet Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (Jan. 1966), pp. 318–338. In JSTOR 1893 births 1937 deaths People from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast People from Pavlogradsky Uyezd Russian Social Democratic Labour Party members Old Bolsheviks Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the