Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz ( – 10 May 1940) was a Polish-Belarusian general and veteran of World War I, the Russian Civil War, Estonian War of Independence, Polish-Soviet War, and the Invasion of Poland at the start of World War II.
Biography
Early life
Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz was born in , a small village in the Zarasai County of the Kovno Governorate in the Russian Empire (now Ignalina District Municipality in Lithuania). Stanisław had two brothers and six sisters. His parents were servants to a local landlord
Following Stanisław's birth, his father left the landlord's service and acquired a small estate in Stakavievo near Vilnius.
After attending an agricultural school for four years in Belmontas, Bułak-Bałachowicz worked as an accountant, and in 1904 became a manager at the Count Plater's estates in Horodziec and Łużki.
World War I
After the outbreak of World War I and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich's address to the Polish people, Bułak-Bałachowicz joined the Russian Imperial army. As a person of noble roots, he was drafted as an ensign to the 2nd Leyb-Courland Infantry Regiment. However, unlike many of his colleagues who were awarded the basic NCO grades for their noble ancestry only, Bułak-Bałachowicz proved himself as a skilled field commander and was quickly promoted. By December 1914, only four months after he entered the army, he was given command over a group of Cossack volunteers, of whom he formed a cavalry squadron. Together with the 2nd Cavalry Division, he fought on the western front, most notably in the area of Sochaczew near Warsaw.
During the German summer offensive of 1915, Warsaw was taken by the Central Powers and Bułak-Bałachowicz's unit was forced to retreat towards Latvia.
In November 1915, Bułak-Bałachowicz was assigned to the special partisan regiment in the Northern front headquarters as a squadron commander. His regiment under the command of colonel Punin L. took action in the Riga area. For their audacious actions, partisans were nicknamed "Knights of Death".
Formally independent, the division was one of the most successful units fighting in the ranks of the Polish Army during the Polish-Bolshevik War. The unit entered combat in late June 1920 in the area of Polesie Marshes. On 30 June Bułak-Bałachowicz once again broke through the enemy lines and captured the village of Sławeczno in today's Belarus, where the tabors of the Soviet 2nd Rifle Brigade were stationed. The enemy unit was caught by surprise and suffered heavy losses. On 3 July the enemy unit was completely surrounded in the village of Wieledniki and was annihilated. After that action, the Operational Group was withdrawn to the main lines of the Polish 3rd Army and after 10 July it defended the line of the Styr river against Red Army actions.
On 23 July 1920, during the Bolshevik offensive towards central Poland, general Bałachowicz's group started an organised retreat as a rearguard of the Polish 3rd Army. During that operation, Bułak-Bałachowicz abandoned the withdrawing Polish troops and stayed with his forces for several days behind the enemy lines only to break through to the Polish forces shortly afterwards. During the Battle of Warsaw overnight of 14 August Bałachowicz's forces were ordered to start a counter-attack towards the town of Włodawa, one of the centres of concentration of the advancing Russian forces. On 17 August the area was secured and the Bułak-Bałachowicz's forces defended it successfully until 7 September against numerically superior enemy forces. Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz organised an active defence and managed to disrupt the concentration of all enemy attacks before they could be started. For instance, on 30 August and 2 September his forces, supported by the Polish 7th Infantry Division, managed to attack the Soviet 58th Rifle Division from the rear before it could attack the town of Włodawa.
On 15 September 1920, the unit was yet again advancing in pursuit of the withdrawing Red Army. That day the unit captured Kamień Koszyrski, where it took more than 1000 prisoners of war and the matériel depot of an entire division. During the Battle of the Niemen River Bałachowicz's unit prevented the enemy from forming a defensive line in Polesie. Overnight on 21 September, his unit outflanked and then destroyed completely the Bolshevik 88th Rifle Regiment near the town of Lubieszów. Perhaps the most notable victory of the Bułak-Bałachowicz's Group took place on 26 September, when his forces took Pinsk in the rear. The city was the most important railroad junction in the area and was planned as the last stand of the Bolshevik forces still fighting to the west of that city. Several contemporary sources accused Bułak-Bałachowicz’s troops of participating in pogroms during the fighting around Pinsk in 1920. The scale, reliability, and attribution of these accusations remain disputed among historians. According to the newspaper Svoboda (issue 85, 24 October 1920), Bułak-Bałachowicz issued an order on 20 October 1920 condemning “murders and looting” reported after the capture of Pinsk, stating that such acts “disgrace our name” and ordering that soldiers and officers caught participating in pogroms be executed on the spot. The same issue of Svoboda published a second order authorizing the creation of a separate Jewish detachment under the headquarters of the People’s Volunteer Army. Historian Anatoly Gritskevich notes that these orders indicate an official attempt by Bułak-Bałachowicz to suppress pogroms and punish perpetrators, rather than organize them.
Failed uprising in Belarus
In October Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz was stationed with his forces in Pinsk, where they received supplies and a large number of former Red Army soldiers who were taken prisoner of war after the Battle of Warsaw and volunteered for the service in anti-Bolshevik units. The unit was to re-enter combat in November, but on 12 October a cease fire was signed. On the insistence of both the Entente and Bolshevik Russia, the allied units were to leave Poland before 2 November. General Bułak-Bałachowicz was given the choice of either being interned in Poland with his units and then sent home or continuing the fight against the Reds on his own. He chose the latter option, just like most other White Russian and Ukrainian units fighting on the Polish side in the Polish-Bolshevik War.
On 2 November 1920, his units were renamed the Russian People's Volunteer Army and transferred to the areas that were to be abandoned by the Polish Army and become a no-man's-land until the final Russo-Polish peace treaty was signed. Three days later his forces crossed into Russian-held Belarus and started an offensive towards Homel. General Bułak-Bałachowicz was hoping for a Belarusian all-national uprising against Bolshevik Russia. His forces initially achieved limited success and captured Homel and Rechytsa.
On 10 November 1920 Bułak-Bałachowicz entered Mozyr. There, two days later, he again proclaimed the independence of the Belarusian Democratic Republic with himself as the head of state. Bułak-Bałachowicz declared the exiled Rada BNR as dismissed and started forming a new Belarusian National Army. On 16 November 1920, he also created the Belarusian Provisional Government. However, the planned uprising gained little support in the Belarusian nation, worn tired by six years of constant war and the Red Army finally gained an upper hand. On 18 November 1920, Bałachowicz abandoned Mozyr and started a withdrawal towards the Polish frontier. The Belarusian troops, hardened by the years spent behind the enemy lines, fought their way to Poland and managed to inflict heavy casualties on the advancing Russians while suffering negligible losses, but were too weak to turn the tide of war.
Representatives of Balachowicz participated in the organization and conduction of the Slutsk Defence Action that started in late November around Slutsk.
On 28 November, the last organised unit under his command crossed the Polish border and was subsequently interned. The Soviet Russian government demanded that General Bułak-Bałachowicz be handed over to them and tried for high treason. The Riga Peace Conference was even halted by these demands for several days, but eventually, these claims were refuted by the Polish government which argued that Bułak-Bałachowicz was a Polish citizen since 1918.
Interbellum
Shortly after the Riga Peace Treaty had been signed, Bułak-Bałachowicz and his men were set free from the internment camps. The general retired from the army and settled in Warsaw. There he became an active member of various veteran societies. Among other functions, he held the post of the head of Society of Former Fighters of the National Uprisings. He was also a political essayist and writer of two books on the possibilities of a future war with Germany: "Wojna będzie czy nie będzie" (Will There Be War or Will There Be None; 1931) and "Precz z Hitlerem czy niech żyje Hitler" (Down With Hitler or Long live Hitler?, 1933). According to non-scientific accounts, between 1936 and 1939 he served as an advisor to Franco's nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, yet historians claim this is merely a legend.
In 1923, there were false reports of his death in the local Polish press; supposedly, he had been murdered by White Russians in the Bialowieża Woods. The Jewish Telegraph Agency remarked on his reported passing: "The murder of this ruthless insurrectionary and counter-revolutionary leader brings an end to the career of a bloodthirsty pogromist," referring to a February 1921 report by the Federation of Ukrainian Jews, that more than 1000 Jews in Minsk and Gomel were killed by Balachowitz's men.
World War II
During the Invasion of Poland of 1939, Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz volunteered for the Polish army. He created a Volunteer Group that fought in the defence of Warsaw. The unit consisted of approximately 1750 ill-equipped infantrymen and 250 cavalrymen. It was used on the southern flank of the Polish forces defending the Polish capital and adopted the tactics its commander knew perfectly well: fast attacks on the rear of the enemy forces. On 12 September 1939, the unit entered combat for the first time. It took the German defenders by surprise and retook the southernmost borough of Służew and the Służewiec horse track. Soon afterwards the cavalry organised a disrupting attack on the German infantry stationed in Natolin. On 23 September the unit was transferred to northern Warsaw, where it was to organise an assault on the German positions in the Bielany forest. The assault had been prepared but was thwarted by the cease-fire signed on 27 September.
After the capitulation of Warsaw, general Bułak-Bałachowicz (formally retired) evaded being captured by the Germans and returned to civilian life. At the same time, he was the main organiser of Konfederacja Wojskowa (Military Confederation), one of the first underground resistance groups in German and Soviet-occupied Poland. In early 1940 the Gestapo found out his whereabouts. He was surrounded by a group of young conspirators in a house in Warsaw's borough of Saska Kępa and arrested by the Germans. According to the most common version, Bułak-Bałachowicz was shot by Gestapo agents on 10 May 1940, in the Warsaw centre, on the intersection between Francuska and Trzeciego Maja streets.