Vera Horuzhaya, Hero of the Soviet Union, was born on September 27, 1903.
A real communist
The heroes of the Great Patriotic War, who fell at the hands of the German invaders, half a century after the war, had to go through difficult posthumous ordeals.
Descendants questioned their exploits, ruthlessly throwing yesterday's idols off the pedestal. Those who rushed under the tanks with grants and without fear climbed the fascist scaffold were openly laughed at.
Then, when this wave of negativity subsided, a new formula appeared - "they fought for the Motherland, not for Stalin and for communism."
The problem is that not all heroes, even with a strong desire, can be accommodated in these convenient frames today.
Vera Zakharovna Horuzhaya is one of those. As a girl, accepting the ideals of communism with all her heart, she remained faithful to them until the very last minute. And these convictions of hers could not break neither the Polish torture chambers, nor the NKVD prison, nor the fascist death row.
Promotional video:
Vera Horuzhaya was born in Bobruisk in the family of an employee, a Belarusian by nationality, on September 27, 1903. Soon the family moved to the city of Mozyr, where the girl graduated from high school.
The Russian Empire entered an era of great upheavals and changes that horrified ordinary people with its cruelty.
The Khoruzhikh family was aloof from politics. Family - yes, but not Vera. She was a teenager when she chose the ideas of the Bolsheviks for herself once and for all. At the age of 16, she left her family, going to the Civil War. In the Red Army, the girl participated in battles with the detachments of Bulak-Balakhovich. In 1921, Vera became a member of the CPSU (b).
After the end of the Civil War, she worked at a school, then at the Central Committee of the Komsomol of Belarus.
Agitator, dangerous even in dungeons
Following the results of the Soviet-Polish war of 1920-1921. Western Byelorussia was under Polish occupation. On the occupied lands, the Poles pursued a policy of assimilation and polonization of the local Belarusian population.
Vera Khoruzhaya strove to participate in the struggle for the liberation of Western Belarus. In 1924, she went to the occupied Belarusian lands to participate in the activities of the local underground.
The 21-year-old girl is elected secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol of Western Belarus and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Western Belarus. A brilliant propagandist, Vera is rapidly increasing the ranks of those who are actively fighting the Polish occupation.
The Polish special services also did not eat their bread in vain, and in the fall of 1925 Vera Horuzhaya was arrested in Bialystok. For her activities, she received six years in prison, which were later increased to eight.
However, this did not break Vera. From prison, she wrote letters permeated with a thirst for struggle and confidence in victory. In 1931, these messages from prison will be published in the USSR as a separate book entitled "Letters Free". The book will be highly appreciated by Lenin's widow Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya.
In 1932, according to an interstate agreement between the USSR and Poland on the exchange of political prisoners, Vera Khoruzhaya will return to the Soviet Union. However, the communist was not going to return to her parents, brother and sister in order to lead a measured life.
Back in 1930, Vera Khoruzhaya was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for her merits in the struggle for the liberation of Western Belarus.
Through the millstones of the Great Terror
After returning to the Soviet Union, she was engaged in party work in Minsk and at large industrial construction sites. There was time for her personal life - Vera got married, and in 1936 she had a daughter, who was named Anya.
At that moment Vera Khoruzhaya worked as the head of the House of Party Education at Balkhashstroy.
Like any person whose beliefs are not a simple repetition of memorized phrases, the communist Khoruzhaya knew how to doubt and criticize what seemed to her wrong, even if it was about party strategy and tactics.
Such a life position was extremely uncomfortable on the eve of the Great Terror. And on August 10, 1937, the Belarusian underground worker Vera Khoruzhaya was arrested by the NKVD. Vera was accused of provocative activities and espionage in favor of Poland. Who was the author of the denunciation is still not known exactly. Some historians believe that it was … Vera's husband, Stanislav Mertens. The exact motives of the act are unknown, moreover, by the time of the arrest, the husband had already disappeared in the camps.
However, Vera's daughter, Anna Shlyapnikova, thought differently many decades later: her father simply disowned his mother, and his further fate is unknown.
In any case, the daughter of Vera Khoruzhei did not want to talk and remember her father. When Anya's mother was arrested, the girl was only nine months old. Vera's relatives took her away.
People who fell into the millstones of the Great Terror had almost no chance of justifying and saving them. But none of the four investigators who worked with her managed to break the communist Khoruzhaya and force her to confess to espionage.
Moreover, the conviction in the ideals that Vera chose in her youth was not shaken by unfair accusations and prison dungeons.
The trial of Vera Khoruzhei took place in August 1939. The two-day meeting turned into a benefit performance for a 36-year-old woman who declared her innocence. “I will remain the same as I am today, until the end of a loyal to our party, which is the most dear to me in my life,” she said in her last word.
On August 15, 1939 Vera Khoruzhaya was acquitted and released from custody. During this period, the new head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, was just revising the cases that were initiated during the leadership of his predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov.
Short happiness in an ocean of misery
Vera's life changed rapidly again. A month later, units of the Red Army will liberate Western Belarus. In October 1939, the communist Khoruzhaya was reinstated in the party.
In 1940, Vera Horuzhaya and her family returned to Belarus, where she worked first in the city party committee in Telekhany, and then in Pinsk.
Vera got married a second time - Sergei Kornilov became her husband. In September 1940, the ardent communist turned 37 years old. It seemed that the most difficult trials in life were behind.
Vera met the new year 1941 at the festive table with her 4-year-old daughter Anya and her beloved husband. This celebration will remain the most vivid memory of my daughter about her mother.
On June 22, 1941, the war with Nazi Germany began. The enemy advanced swiftly, capturing the territory of Belarus. Vera managed to send her daughter along with her sister and other relatives to evacuation, and she and her husband Sergey went to a partisan detachment.
Sergei Kornilov died in one of the first battles with the Germans in the Pinsk region. Having lost a loved one, Vera wrote: "I remembered the strong and harsh words of Dolores Ibarruri: it is better to be the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward, and I understood the meaning of these words in a new way."
She did not feel sorry for herself, while the comrades in the partisan detachment were looking for a way to transport Vera to the rear - the woman was pregnant.
In the fall of 1941, Vera Khoruzhaya was sent across the front line with a report on the activities of the partisan detachment. Having reached her own, Vera learned that they would not let her back - the command sent the pregnant partisan to her relatives who lived in the evacuation in Penza.
There Vera Horuzhaya gave birth to a boy, whom she named Sergei, in honor of her deceased husband. Sergei Sergeevich Horuzhy, who was born a few months after the death of his father, will become a famous physicist. Vera's daughter Anna will graduate from the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy and become an agricultural chemist and soil scientist.
All life in the name of the Motherland
But it will be later. Then, at the end of 1941, Vera Khoruzhaya was in the deep rear next to her five-year-old daughter and newborn son.
This fragile 38-year-old woman had by then gone through so many trials and pains that would be enough for ten. How can you demand more self-sacrifice?
However, Vera was torn back to Belarus, underground. "I … I am unbearably languishing at the thought that in such formidable days, when fascist monsters torment and trample my native Belarus … I remain in reserve …" she wrote in December 1941 to Panteleimon Ponomarenko, secretary of the CP (b) Central Committee, Panteleimon Ponomarenko.
From the standpoint of today, many cannot understand the motives that drove the Faith. Someone considers her a soulless mother. Someone is looking for the reason in the intrigues of the NKVD, allegedly blackmailing a woman to climb into the thick of it.
In an age when success is measured by the amount of income, the self-denial of Vera Khoruzhei, ready to sacrifice everything in the struggle for the freedom of the Motherland and the triumph of communist ideals, seems absurd and abnormal.
But Vera Khoruzhaya was guided by these principles all her life. And, having said goodbye to the children whom she left in the care of her sister, Vera goes to Moscow to prepare for illegal work in the occupied territories.
In August 1942, Vera Horuzhaya, at the head of a group of underground workers trained in Moscow, went to work in Vitebsk. According to the documents prepared at the Center, she passed as Anna Sergeevna Kornilova. As a pseudonym, Vera took the names of the children and the surname of her deceased husband.
Failure in Vitebsk
The Kornilova-Khoruzhei group was based in a partisan detachment near Vitebsk. The task of the underground was to infiltrate the city and establish a network of informants from among the townspeople to collect operational information about the enemy.
By the fall of 1942, Vitebsk was flooded with fascist troops and units of the Nazis' special services. The very first attempts to penetrate the city showed that the documents made in Moscow were not reliable, and underground work was extremely complicated by the vigorous activities of the German counterintelligence agencies.
Nevertheless, the group of Vera Khoruzhei started work in Vitebsk. Thanks to the data of the underground, Soviet aviation inflicted precise strikes on ammunition and fuel depots, on the Nazis' barracks, causing them great damage in manpower and equipment.
However, it was impossible to completely arrange the group in the city. The Nazis literally followed on the heels of the underground.
The headquarters of the partisan detachment came to the conclusion that Vera herself with those of her subordinates who nevertheless settled in the city could no longer take risks. However, the final decision on leaving Vitebsk by the Khoruzhei group was not made.
On November 13, 1942, there was a failure. The Nazis arrested Vera Khoruzhaya herself, sent to her for communication from the partisan detachment Sofia Pankova and Klavdiy Boldacheva, as well as a number of members of the underground group operating in Vitebsk.
The failure of the group in the detachment became known only on November 26. Accurate information about the fate of the underground was not available for a long time. Data on the last days of Vera Khoruzhei were obtained literally bit by bit. It became known that one of the members of her group gave out the real name of Vera - until that moment she remained Anna Kornilova for the Nazis. In addition, the Germans managed to decipher the reports of the group.
Unbroken
The underground workers were transferred to the Vitebsk prison for especially important criminals. Perhaps the last person who saw Vera Khoruzhaya alive was Anna Kitasheva, a scout of the army reconnaissance group, which became one of the few who emerged alive from the Vitebsk special prison of the SD.
On December 3, 1942, she ended up in a cell where there were more than twenty arrested. Among them was a small, middle-aged woman whose courage her comrades admired. There was no living space on her from the beatings, however, despite almost three weeks of torture, the Nazis did not manage to get any information from her.
The woman could not walk on her own; her friend supported her.
At about six in the morning on December 4, 1942, all the inhabitants of the cell, except Kitasheva, were taken out into the courtyard. Later, Kitasheva and the inmates in other cells were forced to sort the clothes that were on those who had been taken away in the morning. Among other things, there were beads belonging to the same mutilated, but unbroken woman.
After the liberation from Vitebsk, it was established that the Nazis carried out mass executions of underground fighters on the territory of the former 5th railway regiment. Most likely, it was there that Vera Horuzhaya and her fellow-wrestlers died.
It was the lack of accurate information about the circumstances of the death of the underground worker that caused the question of rewarding the heroine to drag on for years.
But justice, for which the Belarusian communist devoted her life, triumphed.
For active participation in revolutionary activities and displayed heroism in the struggle against the fascist invaders during the Great Patriotic War, by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of May 17, 1960, Vera Zakharovna Khoruzhei was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Andrey Sidorchik
