On the Documents in this Edition

The 76 documents that follow have been culled from more than a dozen ar-chival repositories in Europe, Israel, and the United States. They constitute only a small fraction of the extensive documentary record that Petliura’s as-sassination and Schwarzbard’s trial produced. That record would undoubt-edly be even more extensive had many documents of Ukrainian provenance not been destroyed during and after the Second World War.³⁴⁰ Fortunately, a recently-discovered body of correspondence and other papers of the Shapoval

338 Motyl, Turn to the Right, 49–52, 72 f., 139–152, 174 f.

339 Tadeusz Zaderecki, Bi-meshol zlav ha-keres bi-Lvov. Hurban ha-kehillah ha-yehudit be-einei mehaber polani [When the Swastika Ruled in Lwów. The Destruction of the Jewish Community as seen by a Polish Author], ed. by Aharon Weiss, Jerusalem 1982, 62–67.

340 Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, The Odyssey of the Petliura Library and the Records of the Ukrainian National Republic during World War II, <http.//www.archives.gov.ua/

Eng/Odyssey.php> (8 April 2014).

brothers, Mykyta and Mykola, sheds considerable new light on Ukrainian perspectives concerning the affair.³⁴¹

The documents have been selected with a mind to illuminating the posi-tions that Ukrainian and Jewish spokesmen adopted during the interval be-tween the assassination and the trial and the multiple contexts that influenced their thinking. For this reason few of them speak to issues that have tradition-ally driven both scholarly and public discussions of the affair. Readers hoping to learn, for example, whether Schwarzbard was in fact a Bolshevik agent who killed Petliura on orders from Moscow will surely be disappointed, as will those seeking an assessment of Petliura’s responsibility for the pogroms.

These issues have not been treated because the available documentation does not permit any definitive determination concerning them. In the absence of any unambiguous, tangible proof that Petliura ordered pogroms (and none has been located, despite the best efforts of Schwarzbard’s champions at the time and since to do so), any assessment of responsibility must depend in the first instance upon a philosophical determination of how the limits of responsibility are to be drawn. That is a problem that documents cannot re-solve. Similarly, until former Soviet archives yield an actual written directive from Moscow to Schwarzbard to eliminate the Ukrainian leader (and exten-sive searches by scholars and other interested parties since the fall of the So-viet Union have failed to uncover one), the assassin’s motives can be inferred only indirectly in a manner that yields far more speculation than certainty.

The contention that the Soviet regime planned and instigated Petliu-ra’s murder (with its hidden assumption that Schwarzbard would not have acted except for Moscow’s prodding) has been founded upon three main facts: The files of the French Interior Ministry reveal that from 1921 to 1922 Schwarzbard was under police surveillance for his “anarcho-commu-nist” and “Bolshevist” connections;³⁴² Soviet foreign ministry documents show a keen interest in the outcome of Schwarzbard’s trial and a desire to influence its course;³⁴³ and witnesses at the trial testified to Schwarzbard’s

341 See Documents 15, 51, 52, 72.

342 Marko Antonovych/Roman Serbyn, Dokumenty pro uchast’ Shvartsbarda v komu-nistychnii yacheitsi v Paryzhi [Documents about the Participation of Schwarzbard in Communist Cells in Paris], in: Naukovyi zbirnyk 4 (1999), 334–346.

343 Yu[ri] I. Shapoval, Vbyvstvo Symona Petliury. Nova informatsiia dla rozdumiv [The Assassination of Symon Petliura. New Information for Consideration] in: Yu[ri] I.

Shapoval, Liudyna i systema. Strykhy do portretu totalitarnoi doby v Ukraini [Man and the System. Sketches for a Portrait of the Totalitarian Period in Ukraine], Kiev 1994, 96–107.

97

On the Documents in this Edition

contacts with Soviet agents, foremost among them Volodin.³⁴⁴ The first two facts, though well established, do not logically require a conclusion of Soviet agency, while documents presented here indicate that the trial testimony in question was not only unsubstantiated but to a significant extent fabricated during the pretrial investigation.³⁴⁵ Yet other considerations that might have spurred Schwarzbard are similarly unprovable. It is known, for example, that Schwarzbard reported on the murder trial of Germaine Berton for the Fraye arbeter shtime and had noted Torrès’s successful defense of his fellow anar-chist.³⁴⁶ Did he perhaps recall that occasion when he learned of Petliura’s presence in Paris? Was it the key factor in persuading him to commit his deed? Documentary evidence is unlikely to provide answers to these or sim-ilar questions.

As a result, neither Schwarzbard nor Petliura play a significant role in this volume. Indeed, it turns out that the thoughts and activities of others that can be documented were far more consequential in determining how the affair unfolded and why it generated the longterm effects that it did. Readers are invited to explore those thoughts and actions in detail in what follows, along with the multiple, overlapping, intertwined, and convoluted contexts in which they developed.

The documents are presented in chronological order, with minor devia-tions for the purpose of presenting exchanges between individuals seriatim.

Documents written originally in English, French, or German have been tran-scribed in the original language only. Documents written in Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish are presented in the original and in English translation. All translations are my own. The translations are meant to con-vey both the sense and the register that a reader of the texts at the time they were written would have gotten from them; hence expressions and structures that today seem archaic or designations that are no longer current have been rendered freely instead of literally. In cases where versions of a document ex-ist in more than one language, preference has been given to a version written in the Latin alphabet. The transcriptions retain the original orthography. The

344 Palij, Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance, 189 f; Mykhalchuk, Vbyvstvo ta protses Petliury; Yuri Kulchytskyi, Symon Petliura i pogromy [Symon Petliura and the Po-groms], in: Volodymyr Kosyk (ed.), Symon Petliura. Zbirnyk studiyno–naukovoi konferentsii v Paryzhi [Symon Petliura. A Collection of Studies from an Academic Conference in Paris], Munich 1980, 137–159.

345 Documents 51–52. See also above, at nn. 171–177.

346 Sholem [Shvartsbard], Fashizm far’n gerikht [Fascism on Trial], in: Fraye arbeter shtime, 28 December 1923.

texts are offered precisely as written. Typographical or grammatical errors have not been corrected. (In most cases such errors have been marked by

“[sic],” but in instances where readers might have difficulty making sense of the text when the error is left uncorrected, a correction has been suggested in square brackets.) As a result of the preservation of the original orthography, spellings abound that are both nonstandard and internally inconsistent. No attempt has been made to standardize them (Unusual spellings are marked by “[sic]” the first time they occur in each document). Occasional omissions of passages have been marked in the footnotes, and occasional emendations have been marked in square brackets. Omissions are signalled by […]. All other indications of ellipses appear in the original documents.

In addition to providing the most precise and faithful rendition of the texts possible, an effort has been made to convey as much information as possible about the physical appearance of each of the documents. Conven-tions governing the presentation of this information in the transcripConven-tions are indicated on the first page of the Documents section below.

Place names have been rendered in the language of the state that held sovereignty over the place in 1926, except in contexts where such usage would have been anachronistic.