SIMON PETLIURA
Summary:
After Bogdan Khmelnitsky, no other name is reminded so frequently through the Jewish communities from the old Russian Empire as Simon Petliura. His hatred and his cruelty against Jews was a constant.
Ukrainian nationalist and commander (Ataman) of the Zaporog Cossacks and Haidamaks armies, began his retreat from the Red Army. At the same time he accused the Jews of being supporters of the communist regime and encouraged a series of pogroms. Attacks began on a number of cities and towns including Berdichev, Uman, and Zhitomir. Although he denied responsibility for the “excesses” of his troops, three hundred seventy-two cities and towns were attacked in 998 major and 349 minor pogroms resulting in about seventy thousand killed and an equal number wounded. He was later assassinated in revenge.
In a bright May day in Paris in 1926, a quarter after two in the afternoon. A middle-aged watchmaker named Samuel Schwartzbard, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion and, as it happens, of the Red Army, is waiting outside the Chartier restaurant in the Rue Racine. A man with a cane, a former foreign dignitary now living in exile, steps out of the restaurant. Schwartzbard approaches him, and calls out in Ukrainian: “Are you Mr. Petliura?” The man turns. "Defend yourself, you bandit," shouts the watchmaker, drawing his pistol, and as Petliura raises the cane in his right hand, Schwartzbard shoots him three times, shouting, "This for the pogroms; this for the massacres; this for the victims." And thus Samuel Schwartzbard – Shalom, as he was also called – assassinated General Simon Petliura, the former leader of the independent nation of Ukraine, who between 1919 and 1921 had ordered a wave of pogroms that had consumed the lives of sixty thousand Jews. He was acquitted by the court of Assizes on all charges.
More details:
After Symon Petliura's controversial (particularly among western Ukrainians) anti-Soviet alliance with Poland's Gen. Jósef Pilsudski failed to drive the Red Army from Ukraine in 1920, Petliura set up the UNR government-in-exile in Tarnów, later secretly moving to Warsaw.
In 1923, as the USSR grew increasingly insistent that Petliura be handed over to them, he fled to Budapest, Vienna and Geneva, eventually settling, in late 1924, in Paris.
Shalom (Samuel) Schwartzbard was born in Izmail, Bessarabia (now Moldova), in 1886, and having survived a pogrom during the Russian Revolution of 1905, fled to Romania. After some turbulent years in Central Europe (arrested in Vienna, deported from Budapest) he settled in Paris in 1910, found a job in a watch factory and married.
He enlisted in the French Foreign Legion during the first world war, was wounded at the front, decorated, then left the army. In 1917, he travelled with his wife with the Russian Military Mission to Odessa to join the Red Guards. It was there that he first heard of Petliura and his alleged responsibility for the pogroms in Ukraine. In 1920, Schwartzbard returned to Paris, set up a watch repair shop, became active in local anarcho-Communist circles, and published Yiddish poetry.
Schwartzbard learned that Petliura was in Paris when the weekly Tryzub was established in October 1925. According to historian Michael Palij, a GPU (Soviet secret police) agent named Mikhail Volodin came to Paris that August. Allegedly, they met and Schwartzbard began stalking the UNR leader.
Following his former ally Gen. Pilsudski's seizure of power in Poland on May 12, 1926, Petliura was warned by fellow members of the UNR government-in-exile and senior Ukrainian military officers that his life was in danger, but he ignored their advice and did not go into hiding.
According to a report in Le Figaro, on May 25, 1926, Schwartzbard was called away by a telephone call from lunch with his wife, returned and left hurriedly soon after.
At around 2 p.m., Petliura lunched alone at the restaurant Bouillon Chartier on rue Racine. At 2:15, as he was walking home, he stopped to look in a shop window at the corner of Boulevard St.-Michel.
A man approached, and called out in Ukrainian, "Are you Mr. Petliura?" Petliura turned to see Schwartzbard advancing on him. "Defend yourself, you bandit," the assassin shouted (as he recounted in his deposition to a judge), and as Petliura raised the cane in his right hand, Schwartzbard fired into him three times, exclaiming "This, for the pogroms; this for the massacres, this for the victims."
According to an eyewitness, the victim sank to the ground saying "Enough, enough, my God." The gunman fired four more shots into the prone man.
When a policeman ran up to arrest him, then protect him from an angry mob, Schwartzbard handed him his weapon and declared, "You can arrest me, I've killed a murderer."
Petliura was taken to the Hopital de la Charité on rue Jacob, where he died about 20 minutes later, at the age of 47.
News of the assassination was carried the next day by the London Times, The New York Times, and all the dailies in Paris. Izvestia and Pravda, ignored the event in their March 26 editions, then mentioned it glancingly in editorialized assessments of the deceased "lackey."
On May 30, 1926, Symon Petliura was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery. Schwartzbard was defended by noted French barrister Henri Torrès in a sensational trial that took place 17 months year later, and acquitted by a jury, on the grounds that he was avenging the deaths of pogrom victims in Ukraine. He died in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1935.