Stanisław Lis-Błoński (2012). Balakhovtsy. Białystok – Vilnius: Belarusian Historical Society – Institute of Belarusian Studies, 225 pp.

Review prepared by Aliaksandr Paharely.

The volume of memoirs by the Polish army captain Stanisław Lis-Błoński, prepared by the Hrodna historians Andrei Vashkevich and Andrei Charniakevich and entitled “Balakhovtsy”, is a major event in itself. It illuminates the combat operations of the group, and later the army, of General Stanisław Bulak-Balakhovich, a figure overgrown with myths. One would like such publications to become the rule rather than the exception and, in the best sense, an ordinary phenomenon. This is a critical edition from several points of view: first, because it is important for the further study of a fairly broad range of problems in the history of Belarus and Eastern Europe as a whole; and second, from the standpoint of the quality of the translation work and the level of the research carried out.

The text of the memoirs by the Polish officer attached to Bulak-Balakhovich’s group is divided into three parts. The first part describes the combat actions of General Balakhovich’s group (the official name for these units in the Polish army) during the Polish-Soviet War in July-August 1920, during the Polish retreat westward. The second describes the group’s actions during the Polish counteroffensive in August-September 1920. The third describes the period from late October to December 1920, when preparations were under way for, and then the campaign itself took place of, Bulak-Balakhovich into the Belarusian territories occupied by the Bolsheviks, while his group had already become a real army.

The high professionalism of the compilers is confirmed by the fact that the book is supplemented with several reports and excerpts from them, also authored by Lis-Błoński. They date from August-September 1920 and make it possible to compare the memoirs, written between 1934 and 1938 after the author had retired, with his immediate observations in 1920. The characterizations of officers in Balakhovich’s formations, compiled by the Second Department of the General Staff of the Polish Army in January 1921, are also of interest.

The appendix also contains an open letter from the general to the Polish Sejm, in which he defends himself against accusations of Jewish pogroms and critical attacks against him and the actions of his subordinates during the war against the Bolsheviks. The photographs and photo reproductions of propaganda posters from the Polish-Soviet War, the general’s leaflets, and newspaper articles devoted to him that are included in the edition are also valuable.

The assessments made by the author of the memoirs, of course, cannot be accepted as unambiguous truth. He himself was never accepted by the Polish military milieu and officer caste as an equal, because his career path differed from that of most professionals in the Polish army, who had served before Poland regained independence in the Russian or Austro-Hungarian armies. Nevertheless, his observations are very apt, valuable, and interesting. Lis-Błoński’s narrative style is far from dry and is by no means poor in detail.

His personal attitude in the memoirs toward General Balakhovich is nevertheless largely positive, which at times combines with mild criticism and surprise, such as the Polish officer’s incomprehension of the general’s inaction when a rapid retreat was needed. This contrasts with the negative assessments in Lis-Błoński’s reports addressed to the Polish command.

Despite occasional idealization by the author, Bulak-Balakhovich appears on the pages of the memoirs precisely as a figure woven from contradictions, and not as a monolithic figure of an exceptional and flawless hero. Bulak-Balakhovich was a man of his time, a time in which his talents and abilities were in demand. They manifested themselves quite vividly in the situation of the prolonged military conflict of 1914–1921. The turbulence of this simultaneously destructive and creative period brought him to the surface and placed him in the foreground of historical events. Among other things, this could not but affect his mental state: Lis-Błoński characterized Balakhovich as a person who was not always balanced.

The view of Stanisław Bulak-Balakhovich as a “Belarusian Makhno” or a “Belarusian Skoropadsky” does not correspond to reality. Nor did he resemble the “toxic cosmopolitan” Baron Ungern (Sunderland, 2005) or General von der Goltz, obsessed with the idea of a German Baltic. Such a complex and multifaceted figure as Bulak-Balakhovich cannot be unambiguously characterized as a Belarusian national hero or a traitor to Russia’s interests. For his part, Lis-Błoński also characterized him, as well as his brother Jazep, as those who “were loyal citizens of Poland and linked their entire future to its development and greatness”.

According to the author of the memoirs, in terms of tactics the general was well suited to mobile maneuver warfare. Defensive positional battles, however, went less well for him. Lis-Błoński writes that General Balakhovich’s group “could have been called a ‘flying division’”. At least until the campaign of November-December 1920, Balakhovich lacked a clearly defined political program and any strategic vision of himself in the future beyond “beating the Bolsheviks”. This, however, did not indicate any lack of ambition in general, or of ambitions for Belarusian leadership, or of a desire for self-promotion. The general nevertheless became an object of competition between different political groupings and different national orientations when the interests of the Belarusian Political Committee and Boris Savinkov collided.

Piłsudski’s cynical remark about Balakhovich changing his national affiliation was made in a conversation with the same Savinkov. The phrase described the general as a person “who today is Russian, tomorrow Polish, the day after tomorrow Belarusian, and another day later a Negro”. In any case, according to the compilers, Piłsudski did not intend to give Balakhovich’s formations a Belarusian national coloring.

Federalist plans and the need to create friendly buffer states along Poland’s eastern border were undoubtedly important. The defeats of the summer of 1920, which undermined Piłsudski’s authority, and the agreements in Riga in the autumn of that year dealt a crushing blow to federalist plans (Borzęcki, 2008). Yet he still had hopes, and the bet rather on Savinkov’s and Balakhovich’s “third Russia” proved more important than the bet on the latter alone. Andrei Vashkevich and Andrei Charniakevich also point to several other circumstances that prompted Piłsudski to place greater trust in Savinkov, who feared competition from Belarusians and treated the cause of Belarusian independence with contempt.

In Balakhovich’s units in the spring and summer of 1920 there were many Russians (about 40 percent), Finns and Swedes (about 10 percent), inhabitants of the northwest of the former empire, but Belarusians and Ukrainians, according to the compilers, each made up more than 20 percent of the soldiers. The change in status of Balakhovich’s detachment into a Separate Detachment of the Army of the Belarusian People’s Republic could hardly have contributed to a profound reassessment by Balakhovich himself and his soldiers of their identity as military men devoted to the cause of Belarusian independence. The detachment’s transformation into a Polish military unit also occurred quickly.

The mimicry of such military formations during the civil wars and struggles for independence of young states on the ruins of the Romanov Empire, depending on circumstances, was not exceptional. The German corps in the Baltic also demonstrated an almost instantaneous superficial transformation of Germans into “Russians” in 1919 (Liulevicius, 2000: 232-234).

Among the Balakhovtsy there were also many Polish deserters and criminals who, through participation in combat, hoped to hide from responsibility or earn pardon. The compilers, however, question whether in the autumn of 1920 the number of Poles could have reached 30 percent. Nevertheless, the memoirs help us better understand the context of Polish participation in wars for the independence of new states on the territory of the former Russian Empire (Boruta, 2002).

Moreover, the episode described by Lis-Błoński, when the Balakhovtsy were mistaken for Red Army soldiers, also demonstrates how great a role travesty could acquire in the life of a society engulfed by war. Captured Red Army soldiers and Cossacks could become front-line soldiers, which the Polish captain, not without reason, considered dangerous. Lis-Błoński even assessed some officers of Bulak-Balakhovich’s group as former “oppressors of Poland”.

As for Stanisław Lis-Błoński’s attitude toward Belarusians and their aspirations for independence, the author of the memoirs speaks on this subject in the third part, on the whole, favorably. The Belarusian formations within Balakhovich’s army under the command of Tsimokh Khvedashchenia impressed Lis-Błoński, who wrote that “…In terms of morale and discipline this unit made a strong impression. It had its own standard and a small brass band. A little later there were two more similar units. Yet this first battalion made the best impression on me. It differed in no way from regular units, whereas the others already looked more like partisans”.

Among the rank-and-file soldiers of Balakhovich’s formations, he was trusted and his authority respected; they called him “father”. He, in turn, liked this address very much. For them he was harsh but just. Balakhovich disposed without pity of all those who opposed him. Those who clearly betrayed him he shot personally. The general’s charisma, military talents, and firmness ensured the loyalty of at least a fairly significant part of his group.

The numerical growth of Balakhovich’s group occurred on the eve of the campaign of November-December 1920. It grew to the size of an army, from approximately 700 men to 16,000–18,000 men. This quantitative growth, however, had negative aspects, since it made the general’s already motley formations potentially less disciplined and more difficult to command, which became evident during the campaign of autumn-winter 1920.

In the text of the memoirs, unlike in the reports, Lis-Błoński undertakes to justify ruthlessness toward the civilian population, the widespread antisemitism, and the pogroms committed by the Balakhovtsy by using the phrase “war is war”. To whitewash and justify the actions of Balakhovich’s units, he cites the example of a Jewish formation within his group, the detachment of Lieutenant Zeitlin. This was supposedly meant to testify that the Balakhovtsy were friendly toward the Jewish population. In addition, captured Jewish Red Army soldiers, together with Hungarians, Latvians, and Chinese, were generally regarded as ideological communists; therefore, as A. Vashkevich and A. Charniakevich note, they were usually destined to be shot.

It is very interesting that the compilers of the book attempted to apply the method of alternative history and reflected on how the fate of Belarus might have developed if Bulak-Balakhovich, instead of campaigning in Palessie in November 1920, had struck at Minsk and joined his forces with the Slutsk insurgents. The hypothetical possibility of creating a buffer, semi-independent Belarusian state in the event of Balakhovich’s successful campaign in November-December 1920 was not entirely excluded.

Readers and researchers may consider how the general’s possible political career might have developed, judging by the text of Lis-Błoński’s memoirs. As Max Weber argued, charisma always surpasses institutions, and judging from the text of Lis-Błoński’s memoirs and other sources, the general possessed extraordinarily strong charisma. A scenario in Belarusian history in which such charisma triumphed did materialize, though much later, in 1994.

The appearance of this very important source at the disposal of researchers and readers is extremely welcome. The publication of the memoirs makes it possible to imagine the historical figure of General Stanisław Bulak-Balakhovich in all his complexity and contradictoriness. Despite minor errors, the edition deserves the highest assessment.

Literature mentioned in the review

1. Sunderland, Willard (2005). Baron Ungern, Toxic Cosmopolitan, Ab Imperio, No. 3, 285-298.

2. Borzęcki, Jerzy (2008). The Soviet-Polish Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

3. Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel (2000). War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4. Boruta, Mirosław (2002). Wolni z wolnymi, równi z równymi: Polska i Polacy w walkach o niepodległości wschodnich sąsiadów Rzeczypospolitej. Kraków: «Arcana».