[2][3] Balinsky was born 23 September 1905, in Kiev,[3] then part of the Russian Empire (now the capital of present day, Ukraine).

[4] His love of etymology began with a book he received in 1916 on collecting butterflies, as well as with the summers he spent in the village of Severinovka, where his grandfather kept bees.

[5] He was a student of the Soviet zoologist and evolutionary biologist, Ivan Schmalhausen,[1] and one of the first people to conduct experiments inducing organogenesis in amphibian embryos.

[1][3] Balinsky also briefly worked in Scotland in Conrad Hal Waddington's laboratory on mice embryology.

[1] Balinsky also worked in entomology and described new species of Plecoptera, Odonata and moths from the family Pyralidae, mainly from Caucasus and South Africa.