THE ASSASSINATION OF SYMON PETLIURA AND THE TRIAL OF SHOLEM SCHWARZBARD

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Dav id En ge l Th e A ss as si na tio n o f S ym on P et liu ra a nd t he T ria l o f S ho le m S ch w ar zb ar d 1 92 6– 19

THE ASSASSINATION OF SYMON PETLIURA AND THE TRIAL OF

SHOLEM SCHWARZBARD 1926–1927

A Selection of Documents

Edited by David Engel

archiv jüdischer geschichte und kultur Band 2

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jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur

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The Assassination of Symon Petliura and the Trial of Scholem Schwarzbard 1926–1927

A Selection of Documents

Selected, translated, annotated, and introduced by David Engel

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Humanities at Leipzig. It is sponsored by the Academy program of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Free State of Saxony. The Academy program is coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.

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I. Introduction

1. The Events

On 25 May 1926, at approximately 2:15 in the afternoon, on the corner of rue Racine and boulevard Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter of Paris, a nat- uralized immigrant Jewish watchmaker of Ukrainian origin named Scholem Schwarzbard (1886–1938) shot and killed a prominent emigré Ukrainian journalist, poet, and political leader, Symon Vasylyovych Petliura (1879–

1926). The assassin was immediately taken into custody and confessed to his crime. Indeed, he could hardly have done otherwise, for dozens of on- lookers had witnessed the deed. He expressed no remorse for his action, nor did he plead diminished capacity. Yet although at first glance his culpability appeared beyond doubt, the examining magistrate to whom the case was assigned investigated for a full seventeen months before binding the assassin over for trial.¹ And when the trial, which lasted for eight days, from 18 through 26 October 1927, came to a close, the French jury pronounced the defendant not guilty.²

1 In the system of criminal procedure in force in France at the time, the facts of a criminal case were determined in advance of trial by an examining magistrate (juge d’instruction). The examining magistrate was charged with gathering the available evidence; taking depositions from the defendant, from witnesses, and from others possessing knowledge potentially bearing on the case; and preparing a dossier of his findings for the presiding trial judge. The magistrate had the power to dismiss charges upon investigation. He was required to bind a defendant over for trial only if he believed sufficient evidence for conviction existed. See Roberto Ferrari, The Pro- cedure in the “Cour d’Assises” of Paris, in: Columbia Law Review 18 (1918), 43–62, here 43 f., 56 f.

2 There are two full-length studies of the trial, one by a legal scholar, the other by a historian: Me’ir Kotik, Mishpat Shvarzbard. Rezah nakam al reka ha-pogromim be- Ukrainah [The Schwarzbard Trial. A Revenge Murder against the Background of the Pogroms in Ukraine], Hadera 1972; Saul S. Friedman, Pogromchik. The Assassina- tion of Simon Petlura, New York 1976. Selections from some of the testimonies of- fered at the trial were published by Schwarzbard’s chief defense counsel: Henry Tor- rès, Le procès des pogromes. Plaidoire. Suivie des témoignages, Paris 1928. Partisans of the opposing sides published several pamphlets in the wake of the trial, describing

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The assassination, the investigation, the trial, and the acquittal all exercised the hearts and the minds of diverse segments of European society.

Their reverberations even echoed well beyond the European continent. One of France’s most celebrated criminal attorneys, Henri Torrès (1891–1966), took up the assassin’s defense, while another, César Campinchi (1882–1941), became one of his chief accusers. When the case finally came to court, up- wards of 400 spectators packed the auditorium at the massive Palais de Justice on Paris’s Ile de la Cité³ – a crowd so large and impassioned that the presiding judge, Georges Flory, requested additional police protection for the duration of the hearings.⁴ According to one eyewitness account the audience included

“quite a large number of press correspondents from virtually every one of the world’s major newspapers.”⁵ French envoys in distant lands reported keen interest in the proceedings and sharp reactions to the verdict.⁶

The events touched Jews and Ukrainians in particular, largely because of the identity of the victim. At the time of his death Petliura was arguably the best-known Ukrainian public figure beyond the borders of his homeland. A founding father of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic (Ukrains’ka Narodnia Respublika – UNR), one of the losing contenders for hegemony in

it from their perspective. The most widely-circulated account by a Ukrainian was A[ndriy] Yakovliv, Paryz’ka trahediia. 25 travnia 1926 roku [The Tragedy in Paris.

25 May 1926], Prague 1930. Among accounts by exponents of Schwarzbard’s case are Zalman Rosenthal, Der Shvartsbard-protses [The Schwarzbard Trial], Paris 1927;

Anonymous, Procesul Schwartzbart. O dramă in faţa istoriei. Adevărul asupra po- gromurilor lui Petliura [The Schwarzbard Trial. A Drama in the Face of History. The Truth about the Pogroms of Petliura], Bucharest 1927; Sh. Weiss, Der shos oyf Petlyu- ran (Shvartsbard-protses) [The Shot at Petliura (Schwarzbard Trial)], Warsaw 1933.

For a contemporary Soviet interpretation, see Anonymous, Protses Shvartsbarda v parizhskom sude [The Schwarzbard Trial in the Parisian Court], Leningrad 1928.

See also Serhii Lytvyn, Symon Petliura u 1917–1926 rokach. Istoriografiia ta dzherela [Symon Petliura in the Years 1917–1926. Historiography and Sources], Kiev 2000, 368–397.

3 Anonymous, France. Petlura Trial, in: Time. The Weekly Newsmagazine, 7 November 1927, 13–14 (Document 74).

4 Flory to Director of Judicial Police, 13 October 1927, APP, C.3.173. Cf. the list of the police guards assigned to the trial: Leroy, Principal Inspector, Judicial Police, “Rap- port,” 18 October 1927, ibid.

5 Anonymous, Der Shvartsbard-protses in Pariz [The Schwarzbard-Trial in Paris], in:

Haynt, 20 October 1927.

6 See, for example, J. Tripier, French chargé d’affaires, Warsaw, to French Foreign Min- ister, 2 November 1927 (no. 343: “Impression provoquée par le procès Schwarzbard”), AN, Ministère de la Justice, 1583A 1926 (Document 73).

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9

The Events

Ukraine during the Russian civil war of 1917 to 1922, he had begun both his political and literary careers in the tsarist empire during the decade preceding the 1905 revolution, working within the framework of the Revolutionary Party of Ukraine (Revoliutsiina Partiia Ukrainy). Arrested briefly in 1903 for his work on the party’s behalf, he had edited several influential political and cultural journals in the Ukrainian and Russian languages between 1905 and 1917 and had published hundreds of articles and poems under various pseudonyms.

In May 1917, following the overthrow of the tsarist regime, he had become a leading member of the Ukrainian Central Council (Rada), which proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state on 25 January 1918. Although forces loyal to the Central Council had initially been unable to assume power, by December 1918 a provisional government known as the Directory (Dyrektoriia) of the Ukrainian National Republic had asserted control of much of the country, and Petliura had been named commander-in-chief (holovnyi otaman) of the Directory’s army. In February 1919 he had assumed the additional position of chairman of the Directory (holova Dyrektorii) – in effect Ukraine’s head of government and head of state. Following the Bolshevik triumph in 1920 he had been forced into exile, first in Poland, then in Hungary, Austria, and Switzerland. In 1924 he had settled in a small apartment near the Sorbonne in Paris, where he had continued to work as an advocate for Ukrainian independence and as a promoter of Ukrainian literature and culture.⁷

The assassin did not possess Petliura’s public stature, but he had become a familiar figure in some parts of the Jewish world even before he fired the shots that would, for a short while at least, make him a household name. Born in 1886 in Izmail, in the far southwestern reaches of present-day Ukraine, and raised in the smaller town of Balta, his biography resembled that of his victim at several points. Like Petliura, he had begun to engage in radical politics on the eve of the 1905 revolution and had served several months in a tsarist prison, in late 1905 and early 1906. His politics had eventually made him an exile. He had spent brief periods in Habsburg Czernowitz, Lemberg, Budapest, and Vienna as well as in several smaller towns before settling in Paris in 1910. Taking up residence in a working-class neighborhood in the

7 For a brief outline of Petliura’s life see Oleh S. Pidhainy/Olexandra I. Pidhainy, Symon Petlura. A Bibliography, Toronto/New York 1977, 13–16. Among recent full-length biographical studies are Serhii Lytvyn, Sud istorii. Symon Petliura i petliuriana [The Court of History. Symon Petliura and the Petliura Movement], Kiev 2001;Volodymyr I. Serhiychuk, Symon Petliura, Kiev 2004; Boris Doroshenko-Tovmatskyi, Symon Petliura. Zhyttia i diial’nist’ [The Life and Deeds of Symon Petliura], Kiev 2005. For biographical details as recorded by the Paris police following the assassination, see the report by Police Inspector B. S. Goret, 2 June 1926, APP, C.2.173 (Document 18).

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French capital’s 20th arrondissement, he had earned a living as a watchmaker while becoming a fixture in immigrant left-wing circles. He had also published poetry in Yiddish under the pseudonym Baal-khaloymes (Dreamer) and had written for Yiddish-language anarchist newspapers in London and New York. Thus Schwarzbard’s name was already known in Yiddish literary circles when it hit the headlines in May 1926.⁸ It would soon become famous (or infamous) the world over.

2. French Contexts

No doubt the location of the murder magnified its impact. Indeed, in France the political repercussions of the case, both domestic and diplomatic, were profound. The assassination came at a time of deepening economic travail to which the country’s political leadership seemed hard-pressed to respond. The left-wing coalition (the so-called Cartel des gauches) that had been swept into power in the parliamentary elections of May 1924 had produced six cabinets in the succeeding two years. The Cartel had been formed largely in order to calm public apprehensions over the financial consequences of France’s oc- cupation of Germany’s Ruhr district, launched a year earlier by the center- right government of the Bloc national at the initiative of Premier Raymond Poincaré, but it had failed to do so. Instead, each successive cabinet had fallen after revelations of fiscal irregularities by Cartel leaders or after dismissal of the minister of finance. Finally, in July 1926, a scant eight weeks following Schwarzbard’s coup, Poincaré was returned to the premiership without ben- efit of election.⁹ Economic troubles grew during the interval between the 8 See, for example, Avraham Revutsky, Ver hot dershosen Petlyura? Di perzenlikhkayt fun Shvartsbardn [Who Shot Petliura? The Personality of Schwarzbard], in: Mor- gen zhurnal, 26 May 1926. Additional biographical information is presented below, passim, as required by the narrative. Details of Schwarzbard’s biography deemed significant by the police can be found in the report by Goret (full reference above, n. 7;

Document 18). Following the trial Schwarzbard published two autobiographical vol- umes: Sholem Shvartsbard, In krig – mit zikh aleyn [At War with Myself], Chicago Ill. 1933; idem, In’m loyf fun yorn [Over the Years], Chicago Ill. 1934. Selections from these and other of his writings can be found in Shalom Shvartsbard, Mémoires d’un anarchiste juif, ed. by Michel Hermon, Paris 2010. As of 2013 no full-length biography had been published, although a comprehensive unpublished biography had been accepted as a doctoral dissertation: Kelly Johnson, Sholem Schwarzbard. Biography of a Jewish Assassin, unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University 2012.

9 List of cabinets in Vincent Adoumié, De la république à l’État français 1918–1944, Paris 2005, 217 f. For overviews of the politics surrounding the rise and fall of the

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11

French Contexts

deed and the trial, when unemployment in France more than doubled, from 245,000 to 510,000. A broad wave of public agitation ensued against what was widely perceived as the Third Republic’s overly liberal immigration policy, which, opponents maintained, had permitted foreigners to wrest precious jobs from Frenchmen.¹⁰

That agitation fed in turn an ongoing debate over the impact of immigration upon French society, culture, and identity – a debate that by the mid- 1920s arguably claimed greater public attention than any other domestic issue.¹¹ Noting what he perceived as mounting affinity for foreign tastes in the arts, for example, journalist and cultural critic Jean-José Frappa observed in 1926 that France “suffers […] at the moment from an acute crisis of personality.”¹² That crisis found expression in much public commentary in the wake of the assassination (in which, as some journalists were quick to note, one foreign-born person had killed another¹³) and particularly during the trial:

Cartel des gauches see, inter alia, Serge Bernstein/Jean Noël Jeanneney, Les raisons de l’échec du Cartel des gauches, in: Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire Moderne 23 (1978), 2–15; Benjamin F. Martin, France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924. Illu- sions and Disillusionment, Baton Rouge La. 1999, 226–252; Nathanael Greene, From Versailles to Vichy. The Third French Republic, 1919–1940, New York 1970, 39–44.

10 Ralph Schor, L’opinion française et les étrangers en France 1919–1939, Paris 1985, 450, 455–463. Responding to mounting public pressure, which extended from the extreme right to the noncommunist left, the Poincaré government took the extraordinary step of paying the repatriation expenses of foreign workers who agreed to return to their homelands between February and June 1927. Ibid., 456.

11 Witness, inter alia, the 1927 remark of Senator Louis Pasquet that the question of im- migration “ranks among the primary preoccupations of public opinion.” Quoted in Schor, L’opinion française, 464. A year later Edouard Herriot, leader of the Cartel des gauches and former prime minister, termed the issue “a formidable problem whose solution is for our country in large measure a matter of life and death.” Quoted in Gérard Noiriel, Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France (XIXe–XXe siècle).

Discours publics, humiliations privées, Paris 2007, 342. For a broad summary of the evolution of the debate since the 1880s, see Gérard Noiriel, Le creuset français. His- toire de l’immigration, XIXe–XXe siècles, Paris 1988, 249–293 and passim.

12 Jean-José Frappa, A Paris, sous l’œil des métèques, quoted in Schor, L’opinion française, 348. Such anxiety appears to have been at the root of the revision of the French naturalization law of 10 August 1927; see Noiriel, Immigration, 352–361.

13 For example, Anonymous, L’assassinat de l’hetman Petlioura: L’instruction s’aiguille vers la recherche des complicités, in: L’Action française, 30 June 1926; Anonymous, L’assassin de Petlura devant les jurés de la Seine: Il s’est glorifié de son crime pendant toute l’audience, in: L’Écho de Paris, 19 October 1927; Anonymous, La situation.

L’affaire Schwartzbard, in: L’Ouest-Éclair, 27 October 1927.

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Schwarzbard’s seemingly improbable acquittal was alternately glorified as a shining example of how the French revolutionary heritage of human rights was uniquely capable of rendering justice to the beleaguered and defenseless¹⁴ and castigated as proof that “international avengers,” who had imported their “foreign scores, troubles, and barbarities” into the French capital, could

“count on the weakness” of the country’s judicial and law enforcement agen- cies to permit them to murder with impunity.¹⁵

Indeed, for more than two decades before the deadly Schwarzbard-Petli- ura encounter the ability of France’s courts and police to maintain justice and public safety had become a matter of some disquiet for much of the French public. Between 1914 and 1923 four high-profile political assassinations had been committed in Paris; in the ensuing trials all of the assassins had been acquitted despite confessing to the deed.¹⁶ Critics of the verdicts, whose iden- tities often varied directly with the political affiliations of perpetrator and victim in each case, frequently laid the blame for what seemed to them ju-

14 Alfred Berl, La condamnation des pogromes, in: Paix et droit, October 1927. Accord- ing to some press reports, announcement of the verdict was greeted with cries of

“Vive la France” from the gallery. Anonymous, France. Petlura Trial (Document 74).

See also Mariusz Wołos, Proces Samuela Schwartzbarda w październiku 1927 r. (w świetle prasy francuskiej), [The Trial of Scholem Schwartzbard in October 1927 (as Reflected in the French Press)], in: Dzieje najnowsze 38 (2006), 71–80, here 78.

15 Anonymous, L’acquittement de Schwartzbard, in: L’Écho de Paris, 28 October 1927;

Anonymous, La situation. L’affaire Schwartzbard.

16 The cases concerned the March 1914 shooting of Gaston Calmette, editor of the right-leaning daily Le Figaro, by Henriette Caillaux, wife of Finance Minister Joseph Caillaux, in retaliation for publishing a letter that damaged M. Caillaux’s reputation;

the July 1914 murder of French socialist leader Jean Jaurès by the young nationalist Raoul Villain in protest of the victim’s vocal opposition to war mobilization against Germany; the June 1920 slaying of Albanian military strongman Essad Pasha by opposition leader Avni Rustemi; and the January 1923 killing of Marius Plateau, secretary of the monarchist Ligue d’Action française, by the anarchist Germaine Ber- ton as ostensible payback for the League’s alleged role in the agitation against Jaurès eight and a half years earlier. On the Caillaux trial see Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux, Berkeley Calif. 1992; Benjamin F. Martin, The Hypocrisy of Justice in the Belle Epoque, Baton Rouge La. 1984, 151–224. On the Berton case see Fanny Bugnon, Germaine Berton. Une criminelle politique éclipsée, in: Nouvelles questions féministes 24 (2005), 68–85. Some later political murderers – most notably the Ital- ian anarchist Ernesto Bonomini, who killed the fascist journalist Nicola Bonservizi in Paris in February 1924 – were convicted but given relatively light sentences (in Bonomini’s case, eight years of hard labor commuted to eight years imprisonment).

See the table in Schor, L’opinion française, 484.

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13

French Contexts

dicial travesties at the feet of the institution of the cour d’assises – a criminal court of combined initial and appellate jurisdiction, sitting permanently in each of France’s 90 départements, in which the most serious offenses were tried by a panel of three judges and twelve jurors, from whose verdict (including a capital sentence) no appeal was permitted.¹⁷ The only French court to incorporate a jury, it was born of the revolutionary faith in the common sense of the populace as a safeguard against concentration of judicial author- ity in the hands of the state.¹⁸ This ethos encouraged a procedure in which the jury’s attention tended to be focused less on the facts of the case at hand than on circumstances that might attenuate the defendant’s culpability.¹⁹ The search for exculpatory circumstances no doubt contributed to significantly higher acquittal rates in the cour d’assises than in the so-called tribunaux cor- rectionnels, where offenses punishable by less than five years imprisonment were tried and verdicts rendered by a single judge alone.²⁰ By the late nine- teenth century acquittals became increasingly common, especially in the cour

17 Code d’instruction criminelle de 1808 (Texte intégral de la version en vigueur en 1929), art. 251, 252, 301, 309, 350, <http://ledroitcriminel.free.fr/la_legislation_criminelle/

anciens_textes/ code_instruction_criminelle_1929/code_1808_2.htm> (10 Decem- ber 2015). For a contemporary description of the court and its procedures see Fer- rari, The Procedure. For a description and evaluation of the operation of the provincial cour d’assises from a juror’s perspective fifteen years before Schwarzbard’s trial, see André Gide, Souvenirs de la cour d’assises, Paris 1913.

18 James M. Donovan, Magistrates and Juries in France, 1791–1952, in: French Histor- ical Studies 22 (1999), 379–420, here 379 f.

19 Code d’instruction criminelle, art. 337: “La question résultant de l’acte d’accusation sera posée en ces termes: ‘L’accusé est-il coupable d’avoir commis tel meurtre, tel vol ou tel autre crime, avec toutes les circonstances comprises dans le résumé de l’acte d’accusation’?” Indeed, unlike in the Anglo-American system, French juries were charged less with establishing facts than in deciding whether the accused should be punished. Facts were established by the examining magistrate (see above, n. 1), but the presiding judge was not required to make the full contents of the examining magistrate’s dossier known to the jury. For details, see Ferrari, The Procedure, 43 f., 56 f.

The writer André Gide, who served as a juror in the cour d’assises of Normandy for twelve days in late 1912, noted that the control exercised by the presiding judge over the extent and nature of the evidence presented made it difficult for jurors to form a view of the case different from what the judge had already inferred from the dossier.

He surmised, however, that the situation was different in the Paris court, where he imagined a more independently-minded jury. Gide, Souvenirs, 49 f.

20 Between 1825 and 1931 some 32 percent of defendants tried in the cour d’assises were acquitted, as opposed to only 10 percent in tribunaux correctionnels. Figures in Donovan, Magistrates, 384 f.

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d’assises of Paris, in cases involving so-called crimes of passion (crimes pas- sionnels), in which defendants demanded exoneration for murders commit- ted ostensibly to avenge heinous affronts to personal honor, usually involving sexual transgressions by a mate.²¹ After the First World War a coterie of young, flamboyant criminal attorneys, led by two of the future antagonists in the Schwarzbard trial, Henry Torrès and César Campinchi, learned effectively to exploit the procedures of the cour d’assises in order to extend jurors’ sym- pathy for such crimes to defendants charged with killing for political reasons.

Indeed, shortly after Schwarzbard committed his deed, one of his supporters noted hopefully that “France is a very favorable country in which to commit a political murder.”²²

Hardly all Frenchmen delighted in that situation, however. In late 1923 journalist and author Louis Martin-Chauffier had noted “the horror, the dis- gust, the dreadful feeling of decomposition” that accompanied the exoneration of murderers whose passion involved not honor but ideology: “It is all too extraordinary that our judicial system will henceforth shield so-called political crimes from [the reach of] the law, as it has long done for crimes of passion, and that murder has now ceased to be a crime and has become a dia- lectical argument.”²³ Much anxiety focused upon violent acts associated with the revolutionary left. Less than a month before Schwarzbard shot Petliura, French newspapers reported that the spectre of impending revolution and civil war had been raised during the cour d’assises trial of two communist youth who had murdered four activists of a militant monarchist band and wounded seven others.²⁴ When one of the killers was set free and the other sentenced to four years imprisonment, a broad spectrum of public opinion appeared genuinely alarmed. Not only the venerable, widely-circulated conservative daily Le Figaro, which had turned toward the radical right with its 1922 acquisition by perfume magnate François Coty, decried the “fearful ver-

21 Ibid., 415; Roberto Ferrari, The “Crime Passionnel” in French Courts, in: California Law Review 6 (1918), 331–341, here 340 f.

22 M. Lowenthal to American Jewish Congress, 25 June 1926, AJHS, Stephen S. Wise, box 91 (Document 23).

23 Louis Martin-Chauffier, « Tu peux tuer cet homme avec tranquillité », in: Le Figaro, 28 December 1923.

24 Anonymous, Un verdict de défaillance, in: Journal des Débats, 7 May 1926; René de Planhol, Le procès des communistes assassins. La défense renonce à ses témoins et la partie civile commence ses plaidoiries, in: L’Écho de Paris, 30 April 1926; Georges Claretie, L’Affaire de la rue Damrémont. M. Vaillant-Couturier estime que nous sommes au début de la guerre civile, in: Le Figaro, 29 April 1926.

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15

Schwarzbard between Left and Right

dict” that had “opened the door to all manner of violence by excusing it;”²⁵ the estimable centrist Journal des Débats admonished that “the opinion that political assassination may be considered an excusable act” would merely

“encourage citizens to take justice into their own hands.”²⁶ The fall of the Cartel des gauches the following July thus brought with it expectations in cir- cles backing the new right-leaning government that what seemed to many like excessive legal indulgence would be curbed.

3. Schwarzbard between Left and Right

Consequently it could not be taken for granted that Schwarzbard would ben- efit from the judicial system’s seemingly growing leniency. Judgment of dra- matic acts like his was increasingly rendered in the court of public opinion long before the actual trial took place, and Schwarzbard’s standing in that court was hardly secure. True, he was a decorated veteran. He had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion at the outset of the First World War, fought in the bloody Champagne campaign, and in March 1916 suffered a severe combat wound.²⁷ But he was also a self-proclaimed anarchist who, as pretrial investigation revealed, had been arrested in 1908 in Austria for burglary and was suspected of having engaged in subversive political activity during his sojourn there, two years before taking up residence in France.²⁸ Like many

25 Georges Claretie, Clerc est condamné à trois ans de prison, Bernardon est acquitté, in: Le Figaro, 6 May 1926. The author observed, “Nous jugerions […] cet extraordi- naire verdict avec la même sévérité si des communistes eussent été frappés, ou des anarchistes tués dans le dos, simplement parce qu’ils étaient dans la rue.”

26 Anonymous, Un verdict de défaillance.

27 Rapport, 2 June 1926, APP, C.2.173 (Document 18). At his trial he declared that he had gone to war for France “in order to defend the memory of the […] French Revo- lution against German militarism.” TT, 18 October 1927, 98 (YIVO, RG85/486/39553) (Document 62). Schwarzbard later described some of his combat experiences in a collection of war sketches: Shvartsbard, In krig. He related the circumstances of his wound in his autobiography: Shvartsbard, In’m loyf fun yorn, 58 f.

28 Schwarzbard proclaimed his anarchist loyalties publicly at his trial, where he also referred to himself as a “revolutionary”: TT, 18 October 1927, 96, 97 (YIVO, RG85/486/39551–39552) (Document 62). Some press reports identified him by one or another of those appellations as early as the day following the assassination: Anon- ymous, Id shist Petlyurn in Pariz [Jew Shoots Petliura in Paris], in: Morgen zhurnal, 26 May 1926; Anonymous, Zum Attentat auf Petljura, in: Schweizerbanner, 15 June 1926.

The initial report of Schwarzbard’s August 1908 arrest for burglary in Vienna, allegedly as the accomplice of a suspected anarchist assassin, was sent by the Austrian Legation

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(though hardly all) in the international anarchist movement, he had been encouraged by the October 1917 ouster of the Kerensky government and the Bolshevik ascendancy in Russia;²⁹ in fact, earlier in the year, even before receiving a proffered military discharge and pension, he had requested repatriation to the country of his birth in order to help usher in the revolution.³⁰ In late 1917 he had joined a Red Guard unit in Ukraine, representing foreign anarchist elements in the Odessa headquarters and participating in the takeover of the city by revolutionary forces in January 1918.³¹ In France of the mid-1920s such a personal history was hardly a source of popularity.

To be sure, in 1924 the new leftist government had reversed France’s former policy of seeking to isolate the Soviet Union by extending it formal diplomatic recognition. Its action ushered in a brief era in which earlier fears of Bolshevik-inspired sedition beyond Russia’s borders abated somewhat.

But by the time Schwarzbard committed his deed those fears were on the

in Paris to the French Foreign Ministry, 17 June 1926 (no. 3893), AN, Ministère de la Justice, 1538 A 1926. For Schwarzbard’s version of the arrest see TT, 18 October 1927, 93–97 (YIVO, RG85/486/39548–39552) (Document 62).

29 On anarchist reactions to the Bolshevik seizure of power see Jean Maitron, Le mouve- ment anarchiste en France, Paris 1975, vol. 2, 41–43. See also David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945, Westport Conn. 2002, 31 f.; Gaetano Manfredonia, L’anarchisme en Europe, Paris 2001, 87–89. Anarchists from abroad who traveled to Russia to assist the Bolsheviks included the Belgian writer and revolutionary Victor Serge and the Russian-born American agitator Bill Shatov; Paul Avrich, Russian Anarchists and the Civil War, in: Russian Review 27 (1968), 296–306, here 296 f. For Schwarzbard’s retrospective affirmation of the October revolution see Schwarzbard, In’m loyf fun yorn, 71–76.

30 TT, 18 October 1927, 98 f. (YIVO, RG85/486/39553–39554) (Document 62). The transcript erroneously shows the year as 1919, but the testimony as a whole referred clearly to 1917. At his initial police interrogation Schwarzbard stated that he had been sent to Russia as part of a French military mission to Petrograd; entry no. 292, 25 May 1926, APP, CB 22/45. At the trial he confessed that this statement was not true; TT, 18 October 1927, 100 (YIVO, RG85/486/39555) (Document 62).

31 Schwarzbard, In’m loyf fun yorn, 77–86. The Red Guard (Krasnaya gvardiya) was a set of paramilitary units that first appeared on the scene in spring 1917. Although organized mainly at Bolshevik initiative, Red Guard units incorporated other leftist elements as well. By most accounts (including those of Bolshevik leaders themselves) they played a key role at several points in the Bolshevik rise to power: see, for example, Leo Trotzki, Geschichte der russischen Revolution, vol. 2: Oktoberrevolution, Frank- furt a. M. 1973, 846–852. On their origins and evolution see Rex A. Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution, Stanford Calif. 1984, esp. 80–156.

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rebound.³² Anticipating the scheduled parliamentary elections in 1928, pol- iticians associated with the Bloc national determined to pry the more centrist Radicals away from the Cartel des gauches by portraying their Socialist partners as dupes of duplicitous Soviet diplomacy.³³ Indeed, virtually from the moment of its opening the Soviet legation in Paris, headed by the Trot- skyite Christian Rakovsky, became notorious among the French public as a base for disseminating subversive propaganda. In August 1927, two months before Schwarzbard went to trial, Rakovsky signed a pro-Trotsky statement affirming the doctrine of world revolution and calling upon workers in all countries actively to pursue the overthrow of their governments – a move that precipitated a diplomatic crisis ending in the ambassador’s expulsion as persona non grata.³⁴ Later that same month violent protests in Paris over the execution of Italian American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were laid at the feet of communist agitators, prompting Le Figaro to warn of “a plan that serves the interests of Bolshevism and of general dis- order everywhere and in particular promotes intrigues against France.”³⁵ In short, Schwarzbard’s politics were liable to obviate whatever favorable public impression his military record might have aroused only a short while before.³⁶

In fact, many of the voices that railed most loudly against the adverse consequences of immigration and mounting judicial leniency depicted Schwarzbard’s deed – which the assassin maintained had been entirely an individual act, undertaken with no assistance, intended to avenge certain alleged misdeeds of the victim during Schwarzbard’s time in Ukraine³⁷ – as an integral part of a larger Bolshevik scheme to undermine French society

32 Anne Hogenhuis-Seliverstoff, Les relations franco-soviétiques 1917–1924, Paris 1981, 262–269; Sophie Cœuré, La grande lueur à l’est. Les Français et l’Union sovié- tique 1917–1939, Paris 1999, 124–127.

33 Michael Jabara Carley, Episodes from the Early Cold War. Franco-Soviet Relations, 1917–1927, in: Europe-Asia Studies 52 (2000), 1275–1305, here 1290 f.

34 Alfred Erich Senn, The Rakovsky Affair. A Crisis in Franco-Soviet Relations, 1927, in:

Slavic and East-European Studies 10 (1965), 102–117.

35 Anonymous, Nous voulons la paix des rues, in: Le Figaro, 24 August 1927. The editorial concluded, “Nous voulons une politique d’ordre et de fermeté qui rompe avec la Révolution et donne au pays qui peine, au moins la sécurité de la rue.”

36 Schwarzbard’s advocates recognized the difficulty even before the Rakovsky affair. Cf.

M. Lowenthal to American Jewish Congress, 22 May 1927, AJHC, Stephen S. Wise, box 88 (Document 56): “It would be rather unfortunate to hold [the trial] at the present moment. […] A campaign against communism is now under way here. […]

The result is a public state of mind which might be prejudicial to Schwartzbard.”

37 See below, at n. 202.

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from within. Earliest and most vociferous among them was, not surprisingly, the nationalist, monarchist league Action française, a highly visible political pressure group whose similarly-named daily newspaper, edited by prominent intellectuals Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet (the latter also a member of the Chamber of Deputies), appealed to a largely young, professional, high- brow audience.³⁸ Only nine days after Schwarzbard’s arrest, in a news item reporting his first interrogation by examining magistrate Marcel Peyre³⁹ (in which the prisoner had related matter-of-factly how he had come to do his deed) the paper declared that although “what is important to investigate is the probable involvement of accomplices” in the murder, doing so would en- tail “too great a risk of conflict with the Soviet embassy and with Rakovsky.”

It also put forth a theory of the crime upon which Schwarzbard’s adversaries in the court eventually built their case against him:

“Recall that after having defeated the Bolsheviks, General Petliura was forced into exile when Ukraine was handed over to the Soviet Repub- lic. Maintaining constant contact with many of his country’s patriots, he labored for the liberation of his homeland. His activities bothered the Soviets. And Rakovsky, who had been governor of Ukraine, recognized his valor and feared it. A plot was hatched against the nationalist het- man.⁴⁰ His death was decided. Was Schwarzbard, a fanatical Jew, sim- ply an instrument in the hands of the Soviets? That is what everyone is saying.”⁴¹

38 On the league and its newspaper see, inter alia, Eugen Weber, Action Française. Roy- alism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France, Stanford Calif. 1962. In 1923 the secretary of the league had been assassinated by the anarchist Germaine Berton, who had subsequently been acquitted by a jury in the Paris cour d’assises. See above, n. 16.

39 Peyre (b. 1883) had served as a provincial magistrate since 1906 but had been ap- pointed juge d’instruction in Paris only a week before the Petliura assassination. A brief biography appeared in Anonymous, Le nouveau procureur général près la Cour d’appel de Rennes M. Marcel Peyre, in: L’Ouest-Éclair, 18 July 1937. On the role of the examining magistrate (juge d’instruction) in French criminal investigations, see above, nn. 1, 19.

40 A common foreign rendering of the Ukrainian otaman (chief).

41 Nicolas Sant’Andrea, L’assassinat du général Petlioura: Une instruction pour la forme, in: L’Action française, 3 June 1926. “Having defeated the Bolsheviks” was per- haps a reference to the interval in mid-1919 when Soviet forces, which had taken control of Kiev earlier that year, were redeployed against Russian Whites along the Ural front, thereby abandoning Ukraine to a civil war among competing Ukrainian and Russian factions in which units loyal to Petliura held a tenuous upper hand.

Alternatively, it may have referred to the spring 1920 offensive against the Red Army

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The suggestion of an attempted judicial coverup chimed with the French right’s overall view of the left-wing government’s susceptibility to Soviet ma- nipulation. In the event, however, it appears to have had little basis in reality.

Actually Peyre’s first order to the police after receiving the case had been to search for traces of confederates.⁴² His investigation, whose results were presented at the trial, turned up no unimpeachable evidence of Soviet involvement. He interviewed a witness who claimed to have identified Schwarzbard in a group of people allegedly stalking Petliura.⁴³ Other informants told him of a mysterious figure named Mikhail Volodin, who, after insinuating himself into Ukrainian emigré circles in Paris, made suspicious efforts to learn Petliura’s address and purportedly knew that the Ukrainian leader had been murdered before the news had appeared in the press.⁴⁴ A self-described former official of the Kerensky and Bolshevik governments, Ilya (Elie) Dobkowski, submitted a lengthy memorandum to the state prosecutor alleging the existence of a continent-wide espionage network directed from Moscow whose purpose was to assassinate vocal enemies of the communist regime.⁴⁵ And the police produced an express letter (pneumatique) sent by Schwarzbard to his wife on the day of the assassination from the post office of the Hôtel de Ville, bearing a time stamp of 2:45 pm, half an hour after the deed, when the assassin was already

by combined Polish and Ukrainian military divisions, in which the latter captured Kiev before a Soviet counterattack quickly forced them out of Ukraine altogether.

Rakovsky had served as head of the Soviet Ukrainian government from 1919 to 1923.

42 Tribunal de la Seine, Commission rogatoire, signed order by M. Peyre, 29 May 1926, no. 1065, APP, C.2.173.

43 Confrontation Koval-Schwartzbard, 20 July 1926, YIVO RG80/451/38077–38078 (Document 30). Schwarzbard responded to the testimony that he had never been in the place mentioned by the witness and that on the date when the witness claimed to have seen him (14 or 15 April 1926) he would not yet have recognized Petliura. Cf.

Anonymous, L’assassinat de l’hetman Petlioura.

44 Confrontation Chapoval-Schwartzbard, 20 July 1926, YIVO RG80/451/38069–38070 (Document 31); TT, 20 October 1927, 116–123 (YIVO RG85/488/39841–39848) (Document 64). Volodin himself denied emphatically that he had “any connection to the Schwarzbard-Petliura affair.” See his letter to the editor of Parizer haynt, Mikhail Volodin, A [sic] erklerung fun M. Volodin, edus in Shvartsbard-frage [Declaration by M. Volodin, Witness in the Schwarzbard Affair], in: Parizer haynt, 30 March 1927.

For more on Volodin and the manner in which his name became associated with the assassination, see below, at nn. 133 ff.

45 TT, 20 October 1927 (YIVO RG80/488/39753–39774) (Document 64). For more on Dobkowski, who had actually worked for the tsarist regime, see below, at nn.

133 ff.

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in custody. Only a co-conspirator, claimed those who painted Schwarzbard a Bolshevik agent, could have posted the letter at that time.⁴⁶ The examining magistrate considered all of these ostensible proofs of that portrayal carefully during his lengthy investigation and, in accordance with normal French criminal procedure, presented them to Schwarzbard himself in order to observe his reaction.⁴⁷ In the end, it appears, he found all of them wanting.

Indeed, none of the proofs linked Schwarzbard unambiguously and ir- refutably to a Soviet operation, as chief defense attorney Torrès was quick to point out during the trial.⁴⁸ Actually Torrès himself appears to have presented Schwarzbard’s denouncers with a more tangible, less equivocal So- viet connection. A former member of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français – PCF), Torrès had been purged from the party in 1922 along with a fairly large coterie of young intellectuals deemed insuf- ficiently obedient to Moscow and the Comintern – a move that contributed no doubt to a sharp decline in public support for PCF for the rest of the decade.⁴⁹ His subsequent notoriety as one of France’s leading criminal attorneys was acquired in large measure through his successful 1923 defense of anarchist assassin Germaine Berton in the cour d’assises.⁵⁰ As his defense strategy for Schwarzbard involved an exposition of what the defendant had

46 TT, 18 October 1927, 38–41 (YIVO RG80/486/39499–39502). In the official police incident report the time of the shooting was given as 2:10 pm: « Homicide volon- taire avec préméditation – aff. Petlioura, Schwarzbard au dépôt », 25 May 1925, APP, B9/2204. The arresting officer initially reported the time as 2:30 pm: Telegram, Mar- chaud, Seventh Police District, to Municipal Police Director, 25 May 1926, ibid. On 11 March 1927 Peyre ordered “an inquiry into the time of day at which Mr. Schwartz- bard could have posted the express letter;” APP, C2.175–501. The postmaster at the Hotel de Ville surmised in response that most likely an employee had erred in setting the time stamp and that the letter was actually posted at 1:35 pm; “Rapport,” 17 March 1927, APP, C2.173 (Document 47).

47 In pretrial investigations it was customary for the suspect to be confronted, in the presence of the examining magistrate, directly by the people presenting evidence against him and even to interact directly with his accusers. The suspect’s counsel was also normally present at such confrontations. See Martin, Hypocrisy of Justice, 26.

48 This is not to say that the trial established that Schwarzbard did not act at Moscow’s be- hest. It is merely to indicate that the documentary record at the time was insufficient to prove Soviet involvement to the satisfaction of all. It remains so even today; see below.

49 Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914–1924, Stanford Calif. 1966, 305 f.

50 See above, n. 16.

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experienced during his sojourn in Ukraine and his service in the Red Guard,⁵¹ Torrès sought witnesses in the Soviet Union and engaged the assistance of the Soviet embassy in Paris in locating them. His visits to the embassy, though infrequent, became public knowledge, suggesting to some a suspicious measure of collusion.⁵²

Suspicions and disputed testimony may have been all that those who saw Schwarzbard’s act as a sign of an invidious Bolshevik plot could mus- ter, but as the testimonies were presented to the examining magistrate and reported in the press,⁵³ the suspicions struck ever deeper root among the French right. In May 1927, evidently anticipating that the case would soon come to court,⁵⁴ Le Figaro owner François Coty took up the refrain with a vengeance, adding detail and background to what had been until then a rather nebulous tale resting almost entirely upon innuendo. On the front page of his newspaper he charged that a Paris-based subversive organization calling itself Secours rouge international, whose ostensible purpose was “to defend communist comrades abroad who are being persecuted by despi- cable capitalism” but whose “true goal” was “to plan terrorist crimes,” stood behind Schwarzbard’s defense. Even more, he claimed, prior to the assassination Schwarzbard had been a frequent visitor to Secours rouge headquarters, where he had received instructions from the organization’s director – a “pseudo-Pole” representing the Third International whose real name was Efim Gheller but who lived in France under a stolen identity as Robert Schmidt – to kill the Ukrainian leader Petliura. In Coty’s reconstruc- tion the victim had come to pose a significant security threat to the Soviet Union:

“At the moment when Petliura was shot through with bullets in the Latin Quarter, he was about to leave for Warsaw, in order to plan with Marshal Piłsudski, in Poland, a Ukrainian offensive against the Soviets. It is certain

51 See esp. below, Document 62.

52 His visits to the embassy were recorded by the French Foreign Ministry. See the un- titled list, 16 September 1926, AMAE, Europe-Russie-Ambassade et consulats russes en France, 1117/172; Surveillance de protection exercée aux abords de l’Ambassade de l’U.R.S.S., 6 October 1927, ibid.

53 The content of pretrial investigations was a matter of public record and could be reported freely. Cf. Code d’instruction criminelle, art. 153.

54 In March 1927 it had been announced that the trial would take place in June; M.

Lowenthal to American Jewish Congress, 25 March 1927, AJHS, Stephen S. Wise, box 91 (Document 49). Cf. Anonymous, Vos iz mit’n Shvartsbard-pro tses? [What Is Happening in the Schwarzbard Trial?], in: Parizer haynt, 9 May 1927.

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that the assassin Schwarzbard met the delegate of Secours rouge, Efim Ghel- ler, at [the organization’s offices at] 114 boulevard de la Villette. It can be deduced easily that the assassination of Petliura was decreed in Moscow and carried out in Paris in order to save the Soviets from imminent danger.”⁵⁵

4. 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 significant ramifications beyond France’s own borders. On the surface, the suggestion 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 commander 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 military 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 established 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 parliament 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 constitution 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).

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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 combined 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 interval 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. Anony- 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.

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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 confessed that he could cite only “suggestive coincidences” in support of his version. 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 Russians 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 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 political 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 immediately 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 associated in the public eye – Ukrainians and Jews.

5. Petliura’s Assassination and Ukrainian Politics

Among Ukrainians Petliura was, at the time of his death, a controversial figure, admired, even adulated by some, criticized, even reviled by others.⁶⁵ Schwarzbard’s act hardly put an end to the controversies over national policy that Petliura had aroused. Neverthetless, by elevating his victim to the level of a symbol, it altered the contours of the debate immeasurably.

62 Quoted in Anonymous, Presa Rumunii pro vbyvstvo S. V. Petliury [The Press of Ro- mania on the Murder of S.V. Petliura], in: Tryzub, 18 July 1926.

63 Anonymous, Cheska presa pro smert’ S. V. Petliury [The Czech Press on the Death of S. V. Petliura], in: Tryzub, 19 September 1926; cf. Anonymous, Ataman S. Petljura, in:

Právo lidu, 27 May 1926.

64 Wacław Zbyszewski, quoted in Wołos, Proces Schwartzbarda, 72.

65 See the characterizations in Vasyl’ Koroliv-Staryi, Nad svizhoiu mohyloiu [Over the Fresh Grave], in: Tryzub, 27 June 1926. See also Mykyta Shapoval to Mykola Shapoval, 27–28 May 1926, NYPL, *QGA 73–3926, no. 72 (Document 15). Controversy had long surrounded Petliura, to the point where he had been the target of death threats.

Witness the following entry in the diary of Stephen Bonsal, Woodrow Wilson’s personal translator at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and liaison of the American Peace Commission to the delegations of the so-called small nations, 8 May 1919: “One of [Petliura’s] henchmen came in this afternoon and whispered that Petliura, the great partisan who had perplexed us all by fighting under so many flags and on so many opposing fronts, had […] reached Paris and naturally was most anxious to get in touch with the Colonel [Edward House, Wilson’s chief foreign policy adviser]. ‘But there is a difficulty,’ he explained. ‘There are many assassins wandering along the boulevards of Paris and many of these misguided men would not hesitate to shoot our noble leader on sight.’” Stephen Bonsal, Suitors and Suppliants. The Little Nations at Versailles, New York 1946, 143.

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Petliura had been one of several contenders for power in Ukraine during the chaotic interval between the fall of the tsar in March 1917 and the final conquest of the country by the Red Army in November 1920.⁶⁶ At one time or another he had clashed acrimoniously with rival Ukrainian leaders Pavlo Skoropadskyi,⁶⁷ Volodymyr Vynnychenko,⁶⁸ Yevhen Petrushevych,⁶⁹

66 For a broad overview of political events in Ukraine during the period of the Russian Revolution and Civil War see John S. Reshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1920.

A Study in Nationalism, Princeton N.J. 1952. More recent, abbreviated summaries can be found in Orest Subtelny, Ukraine. A History, Toronto ³2000, 344–379; W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory. A History of the Russian Civil War, New York 1989, 302–327.

67 Skoropadskyi (1873–1945) led the so-called hetmanate regime that held power in Ukraine from April-December 1918. Known officially as the Ukrainian State (Ukrains’ka Derzhava), the hetmanate rested largely upon the support of large land- owners and was closely allied with the Central Powers against Russia in the waning months of the First World War. When German and Austro-Hungarian troops with- drew from the region in November 1918, forces loyal to the newly-formed Directory, led by Petliura, overthrew Skoropadskyi and drove him into exile. He fled first to Vienna, then to Berlin, where he gathered around him a small circle of conservative Ukrainian intellectuals and for a time enjoyed a modest stipend from the German government. See, inter alia, Reshetar, Ukrainian Revolution, 145–207.

68 Like Petliura, Vynnychenko (1880–1951) had been a member of the Ukrainian Rev- olutionary Party before the 1905 Russian revolution; unlike Petliura he did not sub- ordinate his socialist convictions to Ukrainian nationalism. The first head of the Di- rectory, he was ousted by Petliura in February 1919 and departed for Vienna, where in early 1920 he founded the Foreign Group of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Zakordonna Hrupa UKP) and began unsuccessful negotiations with Moscow aimed at maximizing Ukrainian autonomy within the Bolshevik state. The latest full-length biography is Stanislav V. Kulchytskyi, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Kiev 2005. See also Alexander J. Motyl, The Turn to the Right. The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929, New York 1980, 54–56.

69 Petrushevych (1863–1940) was president of the West Ukrainian National Republic (Zakhidno-Ukrains’ka Narodnia Respublika), a short-lived political formation that claimed sovereignty over the former Habsburg territory of East Galicia following the collapse of Austrian rule in November 1918 before it was defeated by Polish forces in July 1919. Though he and Petliura had initially declared support for one another, each eventually (and reluctantly) formed an alliance with the other’s primary antag- onist – Petliura with Poland, Petrushevych with Russian White forces under Anton Denikin. At the end of 1919 he set up a West Ukrainian exile government in Vienna, which endeavored to spearhead an anti-Petliura coalition among Ukrainian emigrés and eventually found its principal patron in the Soviet Union. See Reshetar, Ukrai- nian Revolution, 288–291; Motyl, Turn to the Right, 33–43.

THE ASSASSINATION OF SYMON PETLIURA AND THE TRIAL OF SHOLEM SCHWARZBARD

Dav id En ge l Th e A ss as si na tio n o f S ym on P et liu ra a nd t he T ria l o f S ho le m S ch w ar zb ar d 1 92 6– 19