Balitsky was a Russian-speaking ethnic Ukrainian, born in Verkhnodniprovsk, Yekaterinoslav Governorate and raised in Luhansk,[1] where his father worked in a factory as an accountant.

The famine was a direct result of forcing rural producers to move onto collective farms, but Balytsky found scapegoats, including veterinarians, of whom 100 were reportedly shot in Vinnytsia province alone, in 1933–37, after a fungus in barley straw killed a large number of horses.

He also ordered the arrest of the entire staff of the Meteorological Office, for allegedly damaging the harvest by making inaccurate weather forecasts.

In 1937, Yezhov embarked on a mass ethnic cleansing of Poles in the Soviet Union, and accused Balitsky of not being vigilant enough against the supposed threat of a Polish Military Organization[13] - despite the fact that the previous April, under Balitsky's supervision, about 35,700 Poles living alongside the Ukrainian frontier had been deported to Kazakhstan.

[17] On 14 July, Balitsky signed a self-incriminating statement, addressed to Stalin, admitting that he was "objectively guilty of unwittingly contributing to the anti-Soviet activities of enemies of the people", possibly hoping that this would save his life.

A week later, on 21 July, he signed another statement, also addressed to Stalin, in which he "confessed" that he had been involved in a "Trotskyist-fascist military conspiracy" with the former commander of the Ukrainian military district, Iona Yakir and others, including several of his own former subordinates, who together supposedly planned to bring about the defeat of the USSR in a war with Germany, Japan and Poland.