Jan Rudzutak

Born Aug. 3 (15), 1887, on Cauņi farmstead, Kursīŝu Volost (small rural district), Goldingen District, Courland Province, in what is now the Latvian SSR; died July 29, 1938. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1905.

Son of a farmhand, Rudzutak was a worker in Riga from 1904. In 1906 he became a member of the Riga committee of the RSDLP, and in 1907, head of the Vindava party organization. In June 1907 he was arrested, and in 1909 a military court sentenced him to 15 years at hard labor; however, as he was a minor, the term was reduced to ten years. He served the hard-labor term in the Riga Central Prison and in the Butyrka Prison in Moscow.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Rudzutak became a member of the Presidium and secretary of the All-Russian Central Council of the Union of Textile Workers and a member of the Presidium of the Moscow City Soviet of Trade Unions. A participant in the October Revolution of 1917, he served from 1917 to 1920 as chairman of the Moscow Sovnarkhoz (Council of the Economy), as a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council on the National Economy, as chairman of the Central Textile Trust, and as a member of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. In 1920 and 1921 he was chairman of the central committee of the trade union of transport workers. In the same period he served simultaneously as chairman of the Turkestan Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, chairman of the Turkestan Bureau of the RCP(B), and a member of the presidium and general secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. From 1922 to 1924 he was chairman of the Middle Asian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B).

Rudzutak was a member of the Soviet delegation at the Genoa Conference of 1922. In 1923 and 1924 he was secretary of the Central Committee of the RCP(B), and from 1924 to 1930 he was people’s commissar of railroad transportation of the USSR. From 1926 to 1937 he was deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Council of Labor and Defense of the USSR; he was one of the administrators in charge of major construction in and the industrialization of the country. In 1928 he was appointed chairman of the Committee on the Chemicalization of the National Economy of the USSR under the Council of People’s Commissars.

In October 1931, Rudzutak was elected chairman of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B) and appointed people’s commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection of the USSR. He was a delegate to the Ninth through Seventeenth Party Congresses and in 1920 became a member of the Central Committee. In 1923 and 1924 he was a candidate member of the Politburo and a member of the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee. From 1926 to 1932 he was a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee, and in 1934 he became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the ACP(B). Rudzutak was also a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.