Born in Elovka, Krasnoyarsk Krai, in the Yeniseysk Governorate of the Russian Empire, he was the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant.

In 1908, a Kyiv military district court sentenced him to death for participating in looting with a gun in his hand.

He is mentioned from this period by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago: "It is time to put six names on the slopes of this channel – the main helpers of Stalin and Yagoda, the main supervisors of Belomor canal, six mercenary killers, after each of them thirty thousand deaths victims: Firin – Berman – Frenkel – Kogan – Rappoport [ru] – Zhuk".

While imprisoned, he wrote several repentance letters to Nikolay Yezhov, then to Lavrentiy Beria.

He was nonetheless sentenced to death and shot on 3 March 1939 at the NKVD's Kommunarka shooting ground.