Moisei Lvovich Rukhimovich

From February to December 1917 Rukhimovich was a member of the Kharkov Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) and headed the military section of the Kharkov Council. In 1917–1918 he chaired the Kharkov Military Revolutionary Committee and served as chief of staff of the Red Guard.

The Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic was proclaimed on 12 February 1918 as an autonomy within Soviet Russia. A month later, in March 1918, its territory was declared part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, and in April 1918 it was occupied by German and Austro-Hungarian troops. Rukhimovich held the republic's commissariat for military affairs and, from 8 March 1918, chaired the emergency staff for organizing defence and revolutionary war. The republic's proclamation remains disputed: most Soviet historians held that it contradicted Lenin's instructions and that the Bolshevik Central Committee disapproved of separating the Donbass and Krivoy Rog into a separate republic, while other accounts argue that Lenin and much of the Central Committee had prior knowledge and no fundamental objections.

After the retreat from Ukraine under pressure from German and Austrian forces, Rukhimovich served from March to November 1918 as military commissar of the 5th Red Army on the Tsaritsyn (Southern) front, in Kharkov and Tsaritsyn, and from November to December 1918 headed, as military commissar, the Central Supply Administration of the Red Army in Moscow. In 1918–1919 he was military commissar of the Central Administration for the formation of the Red Army of the Ukrainian SSR. From December 1918 to January 1919 he was commissar of that central administration and people's commissar for military affairs, and he is listed among the members of the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine as a member of the Council of the National Economy and military commissar of the Central Administration for forming the Red Army of Soviet Ukraine.

From August to October 1919 Rukhimovich was military commissar of the 41st Rifle Division, and in 1919–1920 a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 14th Army. The sources record that he stood close to the party's "Military Opposition." In the same period he was a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of Soviet Ukraine and, from December 1919, of the newly recreated Kharkov Revolutionary Committee. In March 1921 he took part in the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising.

These years formed the starting point of the administrative career through which he later directed the rebuilding of Donbas coal and the construction of the defence industry.

Rukhimovich was appointed first People's Commissar of the newly created Defence Industry Commissariat on 8 December 1936, but just ten months later, on 15 October 1937, he was removed from office. The NKVD arrested him on 18 October. That December he was also expelled from the Central Committee by poll.

The NKVD charged him with participation in a 'counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation.' In two interrogations on 31 January and 8 February 1938, investigators pressed him to confess to being part of a 'Right-Trotskyist bloc' linked to Pyatakov, Rykov, and Kruglikov, directing systematic wrecking across the entire defence industry. Yezhov personally forwarded the interrogation protocol to Stalin in a special report on 8 February 1938.

According to the protocol, Rukhimovich ultimately 'admitted' to deliberately neglecting mobilisation plans and to conducting 'wrecking for the purpose of defeat' in virtually every branch of defence production: shells, gunpowder, poison gas, tanks, and radio communications. The document, however, bears all the hallmarks of a forced confession: leading questions, repeated pressure, and the tactic of presenting co-defendants' prior 'confessions' to break resistance.

On 28 July 1938 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced Rukhimovich to death; he was shot the following day, 29 July. His body was buried at the NKVD firing range at Kommunarka outside Moscow. Under Khrushchev he was posthumously rehabilitated by the Military Collegium on 14 March 1956, and reinstated in the party by the Party Control Committee on 3 March 1956.