[4][5] Yuriy Shapoval indicates that Shumsky was not fully truthful about his origins, possibly due to the practice of characterising oneself in early Soviet history as coming from the lower class.

[3] In 1915 he received the certificate of matura through expedited testing and enrolled in the Moscow veterinary school,[3] but his studies were interrupted by World War I after he was arrested for spreading "revolutionary literature" and sent to serve military duty at the South Western Front.

16 January] 1918 Shumsky was arrested after he, with a group of left Ukrainian SRs and Social-Democrats, attempted a coup d'état to dissolve the parliament, but was freed as Red Russian detachments of Muravyov's troops descended on, and eventually sacked, Kyiv.

[3] Shumsky defended this strategy in order to pursue the struggle against Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, and later the Direktoria, rapprochement with the Bolsheviks, and establishing a Ukrainian state that was Soviet in its form, but nationalist in its composition.

[3] After the defeat of Pyotr Wrangel, Shumsky was a head of the Kiev gubernatorial revkom and a member of the Soviet delegation at the Riga talks with Poland.

[3] Soon after being appointed to the position of ambassador, in May 1921 Shumsky also participated in show trials that took place in Kharkiv against the Central Committee of Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries where he served as a witness.

Shumsky sought to replace Kaganovich with Vlas Chubar, who had earlier opposed the appointment of Vyacheslav Molotov as secretary of the Ukrainian communist party.

[3] In May 1926 at a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, Shumsky was forced to officially recognize his mistake, but it did not save him.

[3] In 1927 he was removed from office after being accused of engaging in disruptive activities in the People's Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic.

[3] In February–March 1927 the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine declared Shumsky guilty of "national deviation", which was labeled "Shumkism".

In 1930 at the 11th Congress of the CP(b)U the defeat of "Shumskism" was acclaimed, while at the November 1933 party plenum speakers denounced the anti-party Shumsky group and the "counterrevolutionary" essence of its national deviation.

[3] Throughout his time of imprisonment, he did not stop fighting for his public rehabilitation, did not admit to any of allegations, and repeatedly appealed to the Central Committee of the VKP(b).

[3] In his letter to Joseph Stalin on 18 October 1945 Shumsky sharply criticized the national policy of the Soviet Union, in particular exaltation of the Russian people as "senior brother".

[3] In September 1946, on the way from Saratov to Kyiv, he was killed, allegedly by a special group of the Ministry of State Security of the Soviet Union under the direction of Pavel Sudoplatov and Grigory Mairanovsky, at the hands of the personal orders of Stalin, Khrushchev and Kaganovich.