Vsevolod Balitsky

Balytsky was a Russian-speaking ethnic Ukrainian, born in Verkhnodniprovsk, Yekaterinoslav Governorate and raised in Luhansk,[1] where his father worked in a factory as an accountant. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Partyas a student at law school in Moscow.[2] Initially a Menshevik, 1913-15, he joined the Bolshevik Party in 1915, and joined Cheka in 1918.[3] During the Russian Civil War, he was in Ukraine, where he took part in the mass killing of hostages.[4] In 1926, he was Ukraine People's Commissar for Internal Affairs.[5] In 1928-30, he was in charge of putting down revolts by Ukrainian peasants who objected to being forced to give up their land and join collective farms, telling his subordinates: "If the order if given to shoot into the crowd and you refuse then I will shoot all of you. You must conform without objections to my commands. I will permit no protests."[6]

In 1931, Balytsky was transferred to Moscow, as Deputy Chairman of the OGPU, third in seniority behind Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and Genrikh Yagoda. In September 1932, he led the interrogation of Martemyan Ryutin, the author of a manifesto calling for Stalin to be removed from office.[7]

In November 1932, on Stalin's orders, Balytsky was appointed OGPU special representative in Ukraine, while retaining his post as deputy chairman, because Stalin believed the Ukraine party leadership was not strong enough to deal with peasant resistance to forced Collectivisation, or to root out agents of the Polish government, who Stalin believed to have an extensive network in Ukraine. In February 1933, he officially replaced Stalin's brother-in-law, Stanislav Redens, as head of OGPU in Ukraine [8] In his first month back in Ukraine, the Ukrainian OGPU arrested 14,230 people. In December, he claimed to have uncovered a network of Polish agents operating in 67 districts,[9]

He directed the Ukrainian OGPU/NKVD during the Great Famine. The famine was a direct result of forcing rural producers to move onto collective farms, but Balytsky found scapegoats, including veterinarians, of whom 100 were reportedly shot in Vinnytsia province alone, in 1933-37, after a fungus in barley straw killed a large number of horses. He also ordered the arrest of the entire staff of the Meteorological Office, for allegedly damaging the harvest by making in accurate weather forecasts.[10] In January 1934, he told the 12th Congress of the Ukrainian communist party that he had uncovered a 'Bloc of Ukrainian nationalist parties'.[10] In February 1934, Balitsky was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In April 1936, about 35,700 Poles living alongside the Ukrainian frontier were deported to Kazakhstan,[11] But in 1937, at the height of the Great Purge, the new head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, embarked on a broader mass ethnic cleansing of Poles in the Soviet Union; and attacked Balytsky for not being vigilant enough against the supposed threat of the Polish Military Organization.[12]

On 8 May 1937, Balytsky was appointed head of the NKVD in the Far East, in place of Terenty Deribas,[13] but once he had left Ukraine, an NKVD brigade headed by Mikhail Frinovsky and Izrail Leplevsky arrived in Kyiv to "expose and destroy the espionage, sabotage, diversion and conspiratory Trotskyists and other counter-revolutionary groups" in the Ukrainian NKVD and Red Army.[14] In July, Genrikh Lyushkov, who had served under Balytsky in Ukraine, was sent as his replacement in the Far East. Balytsky went to greet him at Khabarovsk station, on 7 July 1937, and was immediately arrested.[15]

On 14 July, Balytsky signed a self-incriminating statement, addressed to Stalin, admitting that he was 'objectively guilty of unwittingly contributing to the anti-Soviet activities of enemies of the people", possibly hoping that this would save his life. A week later, on 21 July, he signed another statement, also addressed to Stalin, in which he 'confessed' that he had been implicated in a 'Trotskyist-fascist military conspiracy' with the former commander of the Ukrainian military district, Iona Yakir and others, including several of his own former subordinates, who together supposedly planned to bring about the defeat of the USSR in a war with Germany, Japan and Poland.[16]

The Kyiv Dynamo Stadium, built in 1934, was named the Balytsky Stadium until an order issued by the Politburo on 31 July 1937 ordered it to be renamed in honour of Nikolai Yezhov.[17]

On 27 November 1937 — his 45th birthday — Balytsky was sentenced to death and shot the same day in Moscow, then buried at Kommunarka.

• The information in this article is based on that in its Ukrainian, Russian and French equivalents.
• Shapoval, Y. Truth of details. Mirror Weekly. 17 August 2012