Yan Rudzutak

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Yan Ernestovich Rudzutak (Latvian: Jānis Rudzutaks, Russian: Ян Эрнестович Рудзутак; August 3, 1887 – July 29, 1938) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician.

Rudzutak was born in the Kuldiga district of the Courland Province (now Latvia) in Russia in a family of a farm worker. In 1903, he started working in a factory in Riga. Two years later, he joined Latvian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1907, Rudzutak was arrested and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. He served a part of his sentence in Riga and was then transferred to Butyrka prison in Moscow. Rudzutak was released after the February Revolution of 1917.

After his release, Rudzutak served in various positions in the All-Russia Communist Party, Soviet system and labor unions. From 1920 to 1921, he was the secretary general of All-Russia Central Council of Labor Unions. From 1922 to 1923, Rudzutak was the chairman of Central Asian bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Russia Communist Party and, from 1923 to 1924, a secretary of the Central Committee. From 1924 until 1934, he was the People's Commissar (the minister) for transportation. In 1926, Rudzutak was appointed deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (the equivalent of deputy prime minister) and held this position until 1937.

Rudzutak was a member of the Central Committee of All-Russia Communist Party from 1920 until 1937, a candidate member of the Politburo from 1923 to 1926 and from 1934 to 1937 and a full member of the Politburo from 1926 to 1932.

On May 24, 1937, Rudzutak was arrested. He was accused of Trotskyism and espionage for Nazi Germany. He was sentenced to death penalty, in a trial, which unlike the well-known Moscow Trials, received very little publicity, and executed. In 1956, Rudzutak's case was reexamined, he was exhonerated his Communist Party membership was posthumously restored.

The memoirs of another Bolshevik, Anastas Mikoyan, mention that, before the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Lenin proposed Rudzutak as a replacement for Joseph Stalin as the secretary general of the Communist Party. While Lenin's criticism of Stalin is well known from the Lenin's Testament, Mikoyan's memoirs are the only source mentioning Rudzutak as the possible replacement for Stalin.