The master of the Ukrainian security apparatus
On 7 July 1937, he went to Khabarovsk station to greet his replacement Genrikh Lyushkov and was arrested on the spot on a warrant signed by Yezhov. On 27 November — his 45th birthday — he was shot under the 'special procedure.'
Head of the Ukrainian GPU and NKVD (1923–1937) and the dominant figure in republican security. He directed repression during the Holodomor, sat on a Politburo troika with capital-punishment authority, and orchestrated fabricated nationalist cases. Commissar of State Security 1st Rank (1935); arrested and executed in 1937.
Career Timeline
- 1919–1922Chairman of the Volhynia and Kyiv Chekas; deputy chairman of the All-Ukrainian Cheka
- 1923–1931Chairman of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR
- 1924–1930People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Ukrainian SSR (concurrent)
- 1931–1934Deputy chairman of the OGPU
- 1932–1934OGPU plenipotentiary representative for the Ukrainian SSR
- 1934–1937People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Ukrainian SSR
- 1937Transferred to the Far East, arrested and executed
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionHead of the Cheka in Ukraine, leading the Red Terror
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationPeople's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Ukraine
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeUkraine's enforcer, and its targetHe headed the Ukrainian security apparatus for most of fourteen years, running the mass arrests and deportations after Kirov's murder and the fabricated nationalist cases, then was transferred to the Far East in May 1937, arrested in July on Yezhov's warrant, and shot in November.
Makarenko and the Dzerzhinsky Commune
In April 1927, Balitsky proposed before the Ukrainian GPU collegium the creation of a labour commune named after Felix Dzerzhinsky to tackle child homelessness. Ukrainian chekists contributed 0.5% of their salaries, and Balitsky appointed the non-party pedagogue Anton Makarenko to lead it, acting on a tip from his sister Natalia, who had witnessed Makarenko's results at the Poltava colony. On 29 December 1927, at the commune's opening ceremony, Balitsky personally presented its flag on behalf of the GPU collegium.
Under Makarenko, the settlement on Kharkiv's outskirts grew from a soup kitchen into a self-supporting residential school, eventually manufacturing FED cameras, Soviet copies of the German Leica, in its own optical plant. Balitsky shielded Makarenko at several critical junctures: in 1928 he kept him at the commune after Nadezhda Krupskaya's criticism cost Makarenko his post at the Gorky Colony; in 1936 he intervened when Makarenko's remark that 'even Stalin can make a thousand mistakes' drew an arrest threat. The most decisive moment came in 1937: with testimony already gathered against Makarenko for 'counter-revolutionary activity,' Balitsky personally struck his name from the arrest list in the L.S. Akhmatov case. This bought Makarenko time to relocate to Moscow with his family. And his books were not seized and destroyed as works of an 'enemy of the people.' Even after Balitsky's own arrest, Makarenko went on to write The Pedagogical Poem and Flags on the Towers. The leading Makarenko scholar Prof. Götz Hillig concluded that without Balitsky, Makarenko's world-renowned pedagogical legacy would not exist.