Jānis Rudzutaks (; – 29 July 1938) was a Latvian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician. He was executed during the Great Purge. Early life Rudzutaks was born in the Kuldīga district of the Courland Governorate (present-day Kursīši parish, Saldus municipality, Latvia), the son of a farmhand. He started work as a swineherd after two years at parish school. In 1903 at the age of 16, he ran away to Riga, where he worked in a factory. Two years later he joined the Latvian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1907, Rudzutaks was arrested because of his political views and was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. He served a part of his sentence in Riga and was then transferred to Butyrka prison in Moscow. Rudzutaks was released after the February Revolution of 1917. Political career After his release, Rudzutaks served in various positions in the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (RCP(b)) and the trade unions. As head of the State Water Transport Administration in 1918-19, he organised the emergency delivery of food supplies along the Volga to Moscow to enable the city to function during the civil war's first month. In November 1919 he was posted to Tashkent as a member of the Turkestan Commission in charge of imposing communist rule in Central Asia. In March 1920 he was elected to the Central Committee of the RCP(b). In November 1920 he was appointed Secretary of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions. In that role he supported Vladimir Lenin's position both against the Workers' Opposition, who wanted to put the unions in control of industry, and against the left, led by Leon Trotsky, who proposed incorporating the unions in the state apparatus. At the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b), which was dominated by arguments over the future of the unions, he was re-elected to the Central Committee with 467 votes - nine more than Josif Stalin. Rudzutaks was ousted from his position as Secretary during the All Russian Congress of Trade Unions in May 1921, when he and the chairman, Mikhail Tomsky were blamed by Lenin and the Central Committee for failing to block a resolution put forward by the veteran Marxist, David Riazanov, that would have allowed union leaders to be elected by their own members rather than being selected by the party. In April he was sent back to Tashkent, with Tomsky, to supervise the establishment of the