Paluta Badunova

Badunova was born in Homiel[1] in South-East Belarus, into a large middle-class family. She studied in Buynichy, near Mahilioŭ, and Saint Petersburg, pursuing 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 Belarusian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries.

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

When the 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 Homiel 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 Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika in June 1989. However, despite petitions by activists to name a street in Homiel after Paluta Badunova, there is no place of her commemoration in present-day Belarus.