Paluta Badunova

Paluta Badunova
Paluta Badunova
	Paluta Badunova in 1923
Member of the government of the Belarusian Democratic Republic
Personal details
Born	September 7, 1885; Homel, Russian Empire
Died	November 29, 1938 (aged 53); Minsk, Belarusian SSR, USSR
Political party	Belarusian Socialist Assembly;
Profession	Politician

Paluta Badunova (Belarusian: Палута Бадунова; 7 September 1885 – 29 November 1938) was a key female political figure in the Belarusian independence movement of the early 20th century, the only woman at the Council (Rada) of the Belarusian Democratic Republic and a victim of Stalin’s purges of 1937-38.

Life and work[]

Badunova was born in Homyel^[1] in South-East Belarus, into a large middle-class family. She studied in Buynichy near Mahilioŭ and St Petersburg and pursued a teaching career.

She started her illustrious political career in 1917 by joining the Belarusian Socialist Assembly, one of the main Belarusian political parties at that time. In June of that year, Paluta was elected to the party’s governing body, central committee. In February 1918, she became the only female member of the Council (Rada) of the Belarusian Democratic Republic and served on its executive committee in a ministerial position. Badunova was also a founder, together with Jazep Mamońka and Tamaš Hryb, of the [be-tarask].

Apart from Belarusian politics and independence movement, Paluta was involved in educational and women’s charitable activities.

When the Bolsheviks began to consolidate their power in Belarus, she chose to go into exile. She later returned to Soviet-controlled Belarus in 1926^[2]^[3]^[4] and settled in her native Homyel in 1930. She was arrested by the NKVD, Soviet secret police, in September 1937 in the midst of Stalin’s purges and sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag forced labour camps. On a re-trial in May 1938 she was sentenced to death for “anti-Soviet activity”, spent six months on a death row and was executed in Minsk on 29 November 1938.^[1] The place of her burial is still unknown.

Paluta was posthumously exonerated during Gorbachev’s Perestroika in June 1989. However, despite petitions by activists to name a street in Homyel after Paluta Badunova, there is no place of her commemoration in present-day Belarus.

References[]

^ Jump up to: ^a ^b "В Гомеле может появиться улица в честь министра БНР". tut.by (in Belarusian). February 21, 2009.
^ "Badunova Pałuta". slounik.org.
^ Rudling, Per Anders (2015). The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931. ISBN 978-0822979586.
^ "The History of the Belarusian nation and state". zbsb.org. Archived from the original on October 11, 2007.

[tut-1] Jump up to: ^a ^b "В Гомеле может появиться улица в честь министра БНР". tut.by (in Belarusian). February 21, 2009.

[2] "Badunova Pałuta". slounik.org.

[3] Rudling, Per Anders (2015). The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906–1931. ISBN 978-0822979586.

[4] "The History of the Belarusian nation and state". zbsb.org. Archived from the original on October 11, 2007.

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