Paval Zhauryd

Paval Zhauryd (1889 in Žaǔryd – 1939 in Belarusian: Павал Жаўрыд) was a Belarusian military commander.

Zhauryd was born in the village Cieciarouka near Slutsk and graduated from the Slutsk Gymnasium in 1909. As a student of the Gymnasium, Zhauryd created a Belarusian independententist club with his classmates. After Gymnasium he studied at the Law faculty of the Warsaw University.

He was mobilized into the Russian Imperial Army in 1916, during the First World War. And after a military training in Poltava, Paval Zhauryd has been sent to Turkestan and later to the Romanian Front. After the Russian February Revolution Paval Zhauryd has been elected his regiment's committee president. He was a delegate at the First All-Belarusian congress in December 1917, where preparations to the declaration of independence of the Belarusian National Republic have been initiated.

Since 1918 Zhauryd has been working as a lawyer in Slutsk. At that time he became a member of the Belarusian Socialist-Revolutionary Party. In the summer of 1919 he was arrested by Bolsheviks and accused of "assisting Denikin" and brought to Smolensk.

Liberated in 1919, Zhauryd came back to Slutsk and was elected president of the Slutsk Belarusian Committee, a local group supporting the Belarusian National Republic.

In July 1920 Zhauryd was mobilized by Bolsheviks in the Red Army and was appointed aide to commander of the Slutsk cavalry unit. In late 1920, Belarusian officials appointed Zhauryd the Commissary of the Belarusian National Republic in the Slutsk powiat. In this function Paval Zhauryd was one of the commanders of the anti-Bolshevik Slutsk defence action.

Since 1921 Zhauryd lived in Vilnius, where he was member of the local Belarusian National Committee and the Belarusian Schools Council. He later migrated to East Belarus and worked in his parents' place, in the villages Bor and Zarechcha near Slutsk. In 1923–1930 Zhauryd worked in the Belarusian Agroindustrial Union, in an agricultural education institution in the town of Marjina Horka, the Belarusian Culture Institute and the newspaper Zvyazda.

Along with several other Belarusian intellectuals, Paval Zhauryd was arrested by the GPU on 18 July 1930 as part of the Case of the Union of Liberation of Belarus. In April 1931 he was sentenced to three years of concentration camp. After liberation in 1933, he lived in Sarapul, Udmurtia.

In 1937 Zhauryd was again arrested "for anti-Soviet propaganda" and sentenced for ten years of concentration camps. He was sent to Knyazhpogost in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic where he died in prison.

Paval Zhauryd was rehabilitated in 1988 by the Belarusian Supreme Court and the Oblast Court of Kirov.