Background
Vera Kharuzhaya was born into the family of an administrative worker in Babruysk, Russian Empire, before the Revolution of 1905.
Vera Kharuzhaya was born into the family of an administrative worker in Babruysk, Russian Empire, before the Revolution of 1905.
In 1919 she graduated from a workers school in Mazyr.
She was executed as a partisan by the Germans after the anti-Soviet Operation Barbarossa. The town was handed over to the Bolsheviks in the Riga Peace Treaty and became part of the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Deployment to Poland
Since 1920 Kharuzhaya actively participated in the subversive anti-Polish campaign led by the Communist International. After graduating from the senior communist party school in the Soviet Union, in February 1924 she was secretly deployed across the border to the Second Polish Republic.
In September 1925 Kharuzhaya was arrested by the Poles, convicted of subversive activity and sentenced to 8 years of prison.
In 1932 she was handed over to the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics in exchange for a Polish political prisoner held in a Soviet prison. In 1937 she was arrested by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs and spent two years in prison.
In August 1939 Kharuzhaya was released ahead of the Soviet invasion of Poland. After the German attack on the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics under the codename Operation Barbarossa Kharuzhaya joined a Soviet partisan unit
In November 1942 she was arrested and eventually executed by the Germans.
On that occasion one of the streets in the centre of Minsk has been renamed by the Soviets in honour of Kharuzhaya.
Kharuzhaya found employment in the public schools teaching, and served as Political commissar of local Communist Youth League branches in the areas of Mazyr and Babruysk (now eastern Belarus). In 1922-1923 she worked in the administration of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of Belarus, also working in several Belarusian Soviet newspapers. While in eastern Poland (present-day West Belarus), she was appointed member of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of West Belarus and printed illegal Belarusian communist papers.