Vasily Sharangovich

Vasily Fomich Sharangovich (; , Vasil Sharanhovich; March 4, 1897 – March 15, 1938) was a Belarusian Soviet politician and the first secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussian SSR in the Soviet Union. He was executed after the last of the Moscow Trials, the Trial of the Twenty-One, in 1938.

Biography Vasily Sharangovich was born into a peasant family in Vilna province, in modern-day Lithuania. He worked as a manual labourer. He joined the Bolsheviks in December 1917, after they had seized power, and enlisted in the Red Army. In 1919, he was sent to work underground in Minsk province, which was under Polish occupation. Arrested by Polish intelligence in 1920, he was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to 10 years in prison. He was released after 18 months as part of a prisoner exchange. Sharangovich described it as "a dog's death for a dog". He told the Congress:

We must destroy to the end the remnants of the Japanese-German and Polish spies and saboteurs, the remnants of the Trotskyist-Bukharin gang and the nationalist carrion, crush and grind them to powder, no matter how they disguise themselves, no matter what hole they hide in. In March 1938, he appeared in the third of the Moscow show trials, where Nikolai Bukharin was the principal defendant, and testified that Bukharin had been a spy. Bukharin denied it, called Sharangovich an agent provocateur, and said that he had never heard of him until he read his testimony. At that point, Sharangovich shouted at Bukharin to "stop lying!" Despite all the help he gave the authorities, he was sentenced to death, and shot—his last words were:

Sharangovich was rehabilitated in 1958.