Known in the West as Georg Rumer, he was a close friend of Lev Landau, and was arrested with him during the Great Purge in 1938.

In 1927 he married Lyudmila Zalkind, his girlfriend of nine years, and emigrated with her to Oldenburg, Germany, where he enrolled to study construction engineering.

[1][2] Rumer was arrested on the Arbat Street in April 1938 as an accomplice of the "public enemy", Landau, when he was going to a birthday party.

While in jail Rumer first worked on plane flutter and wobble problems in a sharashka situated at an Omsk suburb.

When his exile term ended, he was accepted for a senior staff scientist at the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

In the end of 1954 he was informed by the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union that his case was reconsidered and the sentence was waived due to the newly discovered evidence.

[1] Rumer lectured at the Novosibirsk teachers' training institute, held a position of the head of the Theoretical Physics Department at the East-Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1953 to 1957.