International Implications

Coty’s association of the assassination with occurrences not only in Paris and Moscow but also in Warsaw suggested that the event possessed signif-icant ramifications beyond France’s own borders. On the surface, the sug-gestion was not improbable. Two weeks before Petliura’s murder, his former ally and patron, Józef Piłsudski, had reassumed power in Poland following a military coup that had overthrown the country’s parliamentary regime.

Piłsudski (1867–1935), an early leader of the Polish Socialist Party and com-mander of the Polish Legions that fought on the side of the Central Pow-ers during the First World War, had served as Poland’s head of state (naczel-nik państwa) from the country’s declaration of independence in November 1918 until the implementation of its first constitution in December 1922. In April 1920, at the height of the war between Poland and the Soviet Union, he had signed an agreement (the Treaty of Warsaw) with Petliura’s Ukrai-nian National Republic, which during the previous year had lost both mili-tary and political control of its territory – territory that ultimately fell under Bolshevik rule. The agreement recognized Ukrainian independence east of the Zbrucz River (the former Habsburg-Imperial Russian border) and es-tablished a Polish-Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik military alliance. Earlier, in De-cember 1919, Piłsudski had given Petliura asylum in Warsaw; subsequently a Ukrainian government-in-exile, under Petliura’s leadership, had operated in Tarnów. In March 1921 Piłsudski’s political opponents in Poland’s par-liament had scuttled the agreement by concluding the Treaty of Riga, which recognized Soviet Ukrainian sovereignty in all of the areas claimed by the Ukrainian National Republic. That action, along with a newly-adopted con-stitution that provided for a strong parliament and a weak presidency, no doubt hastened his decision to retire from power – a decision he reversed with his May 1926 military coup, undertaken at a time when

parliamen-55 François Coty, « Un front unique » contre le communisme, in: Le Figaro, 19 May 1927, 1 (Document 54).

23

International Implications

tary rule appeared to much of Poland’s public to have crumbled beyond repair.⁵⁶

Piłsudski was thus a longstanding anti-Bolshevik. At the head of com-bined Polish and Ukrainian forces he had driven the Red Army out of Kiev in May 1920 and had held it for three weeks before retreating in the face of a So-viet counterattack. Consequently his assumption of the reins of government in Poland had aroused some initial anxiety in Moscow and elsewhere in Eu-rope over the prospect of renewed hostilities along the Polish-Soviet border.⁵⁷ However, the anxiety actually appears to have been focused less on the Ukrainian than on the Baltic front, and in any event the Polish Foreign Min-istry moved quickly to obviate it by promising no change in policy from the previous regime.⁵⁸ Moreover, the Soviets would have had little reason to fear 56 On the 1926 seizure of power see Joseph Rothschild, Piłsudski’s Coup d’Etat, New York 1966. On the background and history of the Warsaw Treaty see Michael Palij, The Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance, 1919–1921. An Aspect of the Ukrainian Revolution, Edmonton 1995. On Piłsudski’s relations with Petliura during the in-terval between the Treaties of Warsaw and Riga, see Jan Pisuliński, Nie tylko Petlura.

Kwestia ukraińska w polskiej polityce zagranicznej w latach 1918–1923 [Not Only Petliura. The Ukrainian Question in Polish Foreign Policy in the Years 1918–1923], Wrocław 2004, 227–295.

57 Rothschild, Piłsudski’s Coup, 302; Wojciech Materski, Na widecie. II Rzeczpospo-lita wobec Sowietów, 1918–1943 [On the Watchtower. The Second Republic and the Soviets, 1918–1943], Warsaw 2005, 294 f.; Piotr S. Wandycz, The Twilight of French Eastern Alliances, 1926–1936. French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from Locarno to the Remilitarization of the Rhineland, Princeton N.J. 1988, 48–50. Cf. mous, The Situation in Poland. Soviet Interest, in: The Times, 19 May 1926; Anony-mous, Moscow and Pilsudski Coup, in: ibid., 21 May 1926.

58 Telegramma chlena kollegii Narodnovo komissariata inostrannykh del SSSR B. S.

Stomonyakova polnomochnomu predstavitelyu SSSR v Varshave P. L. Voikovu o besede s poslannikom Pol’shi v Moskve S. Kętrzyńskim v svyazi s perevorotom Yu.

Pilsudskovo v Pol’she, 16 May 1926 [Telegram from B. S. Stomonyakov, Member of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, to P. L. Voikov, Pleni-potentionary of the USSR in Warsaw, Concerning a Conversation with the Polish Legate in Moscow, S. Kętrzyński, in the Context of the coup d’etat of J. Piłsudski in Poland, 16 May 1926], in: Pol’skaya Akademiia Nauk et al. (eds.), Dokumenty i materialy po istorii sovetsko-pol’skikh otnosheniy [Documents and Materials on the History of Soviet-Polish Relations], 12 vols., Moscow 1963–86, here vol. 5, 9; Iz zapisi besedy […] Stomonyakova […] s Kętrzyńskim: o soglasovanii pozitsiy Pol’shi i pribaltiyskikh gosudarstv v otnosheniy SSSR, 29 May 1926 [From the Record of a Conversation (…) of Stomonyakov (…) with Kętrzyński: On the Coordination of Positions between Poland and the Baltic States with Respect to the USSR], in: ibid., 11–13.

Petliura: The French authorities had permitted him to take up residence in Paris in 1924 only on condition that he refrain from all political activity, and they had monitored his correspondence and visitors to guarantee his compliance.⁵⁹ Thus in the final analysis it seems more likely that Coty’s re-construction of events reflected primarily his own hopes for forging a broad European anti-Soviet bloc.⁶⁰ Indeed, when Schwarzbard issued an emphatic denial from prison of Coty’s charges and repeated his consistent assertion that he had acted entirely alone and on his own volition, the publisher con-fessed that he could cite only “suggestive coincidences” in support of his ver-sion. Still, he insisted, he felt compelled to combat “the formidable powers who ordered Petliura’s death,” both in the name of “the thirty million Rus-sians whom the new masters of Russia (who are not RusRus-sians themselves) exterminated through civil war and famine, with horrific suffering” and in order to defend “the eternal victim of all [Soviet] machinations, crimes, and conspiracies – France.”⁶¹

Nevertheless, the general suspicion of a Soviet role in the assassination resonated even beyond France’s borders, especially in the east European countries that had been strongly allied with France since the end of the First World War and who feared the growing power of the region’s geopolitical giant. In Romania, for example, press reports of Petliura’s death noted that the Ukrainian leader was a symbol of ongoing resistance to Bolshevik rule capable of inspiring others to work for regime change in Russia; hence, one commentator reasoned, his murder must have been a political act, part of “a methodical and premeditated program to suffocate Ukrainian national ex-59 Minister of Interior and Director of General Security Service to Prefect of Police,

Paris, 10 October 1924, APP, B9/2204; Rapport: Chef du Service des Recherches Ad-ministratives et des Jeux à Monsieur le Préfet de Police, « A. S. de Petlura, Simon, ancien chef du Gouvernement d’Ukraine », 25 January 1925, ibid.

60 During the two months before publishing his statement about Schwarzbard he had broached that hope with the foreign ministers of France and Britain, Aristide Bri-and Bri-and Austen Chamberlain; Carley, Episodes from the Early Cold War, 1293. Two months later, in the wake of Britain’s move to sever diplomatic relations with the USSR, he traveled to London as a featured speaker at a “Hands Off Britain” rally, where he predicted that France would soon join Britain and Italy in “reduc[ing] those polit-ical criminals [in the Soviet Union’s European missions] to impotence and send[ing]

them back to their country, which they had turned into a place of evil influence.”

Anonymous, “Hands Off Britain” Campaign. A Victory Rally, in: The Times, 16 July 1927.

61 Coty, « Un front unique » contre le communisme (Document 54). The same edition of the newspaper urged Britain to sever diplomatic relations with the Soviets; Anon-ymous, La Note des Soviets, in: ibid.

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Petliura’s Assassination and Ukrainian Politics

istence.”⁶² In Czechoslovakia newspapers right and left debated the possible extent of Moscow’s involvement in the murder.⁶³ And an official of the Polish Legation in Paris recalled receiving “clear instructions” from Warsaw imme-diately following the killing “not to talk about this event with anyone at all and to sit quietly” – so delicate might Poland’s diplomatic situation be if the Soviets had indeed had a hand in Petliura’s violent demise.⁶⁴

Yet no matter how great the significance that what soon came to be la-beled the “Petliura-Schwarzbard affair” held for French politics and Euro-pean international relations, its import was immeasurably greater for the two communities with which victim and perpetrator were most commonly asso-ciated in the public eye – Ukrainians and Jews.