Roman Skyrmunt wrote about his origins: "I myself am a native of the Belarusian Polesia, a descendant of a Lithuanian family that has lived in this region since ancient times, since centuries, and my ancestors date back to the 17th century and used the Belarusian language as their mother tongue".His father was the son of Alexander Aliaksandrawicz Skirmunt (1830-1909), a prominent landowner of Pinsk District, and his mother was the daughter of Zyanon Janovich Lubanski (about 1807-1854), Viley District Marshall (1835 —1841, 1844—1847), from his wife Marta Lyavkovich.

He became a faithful friend, associate and, according to Count Ippolit Korvin-Milewski, "favorite student" of Edward Vainilovich in terms of economic work in the Moscow State University of Technology and political activity.

Skirmunt helped found a Polish-Belarusian fraction, the so-called Western Borderlands Group (Russian: Группа западных окраин), which united with deputies from Polish provinces (the so-called "Polish circle from the Kingdom of Poland") and formed the core of the parliamentary group "Union of Autonomists".

He envisioned the "regional party" project as an international bloc of Polish, Belarusian and Lithuanian political organizations.

On 17 June 1907 a congress of landowners of six Belarusian-Lithuanian provinces took place in Vilnius to create the "National Party of Lithuania and Belarus", which had been announced long ago in the press.

As a result, the Regional Party of Lithuania and Belarus was headed by the main leader of conservative regionalists, Edward Vainilovich.

From October 1910 to January 1911, Skirmunt was a senator-deputy of the State Council of the Russian Empire, where he was elected for a three-year term from the Minsk province under the patronage of Edward Vainilovich.

In 1911 he returned to Belarus and worked as leader of the local zemstvo of Minsk; he was also a member of the board of the Vilnius Land Bank.

In January 1917, he headed the Minsk branch of the Belarusian Society for Aid to War Victims, which served to provide a cover for political groups banned by the German occupation forces.

In April 1918 Skirmunt became a member of the Council of the newly proclaimed Belarusian Democratic Republic; in July he became Prime Minister of Belarus and secretary for foreign affairs.

In November 1918, as part of an extraordinary Belarusian delegation, he was in Germany and Switzerland for the purpose of recognizing the independence of Belarus.

Vilnius conservatives (Prince Eustachy Sapieha and Stanislav Matskevich (1896-1966)) also took an active part in drafting the new constitution of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, adopted on 23 April 1935.

On 28 August 1933, in Vilnius, in the building of the Vilnius Land Bank, a meeting convened by the Conservative Organization of State Work was held, at which Prince Sapieha, who wrote the treatise "Constitution of State Interests" (Konstytucja racji stanu"), read a report on the legal solutions proposed in the new constitution.

In September 1939 the local population of Pinshchyna, which supported the Soviets, made a fatal mistake: they ran out to meet a train full of Polish soldiers with red banners.

As Father Mikalai (Matsukevich) mentions, during the September turmoil after the occupation of Western Belarus by Soviet troops in 1939, Skirmunt hid with his friend, the peasant Roman Baranchuk, in the village of Parechcha.

In the spring of 1940, shepherds who grazed cows in the Koran Forest found the body of Skirmunt and informed the authorities about the find.

As Skirmunt's body was carried through the village of Parechcha, the peasants poured out into the street to pay their last respects to their lord.

In the course of the First World War, the palace in Porecchi and its collections survived, but the factory buildings and farms were looted by the Germans or destroyed by military actions.

However, at the same time, Skirmunt regularly helped the peasants of Poreč, including giving them pieces of land as a gift.

He was kind to his servants and helped more than one elderly peasant by bringing, cutting and chopping firewood in the winter, or pouring grain into their granary in the spring.

According to a survey of local residents conducted by the historian Alexander Smolyanchuk, Skirmunt had a mistress, whose name was Kateryna Tereshka (Tiareshchenko), from among the rural workers of his estate.

According to the testimony of the villagers, Skirmunt had four illegitimate children from Kateryna: Alexander (Oles), Roman, Vladislav and Peter (Petrus).

In 2009, in Ivacevichy, in the Greek-Catholic parish, the icons of the Mother of God Zhirovitskaya installed a memorial plaque in honor of Skirmunt.