Rudzutaks was born in the Kuldīga district of the Courland Governorate (present-day Kursīši parish, Saldus municipality, Latvia), the son of a farmhand.

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.

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.

[2] 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.

Alexander Barmine, the Soviet official who greeted them on arrival, remembered Rudzutaks as "a tall fellow with spectacles and curly hair, his strong features set in a round face.

"[4] In April 1922 Rudzutaks was a member of the Soviet delegation at the Genoa Conference, where his task appears to have been to alert Moscow whenever the unpredictable foreign minister, Georgy Chicherin, departed from his negotiating brief.

[7] In February 1932 Rudzutaks gave up his place on the Politburo on being appointed chairman of the Central Control Commission, and of Rabkrin, making him the principal judge in cases involving alleged breaches of Communist Party discipline.

A fellow prisoner explained that they were Rudzutaks's former dinner guests, who had been held for three months, and "the poor things haven't been allowed any parcels, so they're still in their evening dress.

Stalin's crony Vyacheslav Molotov was asked, some 40 years later, to explain, and said that Rudzutaks was arrested because "he was too easygoing about the opposition and considered it all nonsense, trifles.

He was included in a list of 118 former high-ranking Bolsheviks, which was passed to Stalin in July 1938, just as Lavrentiy Beria was about to take over control of the NKVD from the murderous Nikolai Yezhov.

At his trial, which lasted 20 minutes, Rudzutaks submitted a written statement protesting that "there is in the NKVD an as yet not liquidated center which is craftily manufacturing cases, which forces innocent persons to confess.