From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Sholom Schwartzbard was a Jewish anarchist and political assassin.
In 1926 he assassinated Symon Petlura, the head of government-in-exile of Ukrainian Peoples Republic in Paris. The murder was reasoned by alleged anti-Semitism of Petlura. Accused by Ukrainian emigrants of being Soviet spy. 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. In Israel treated as national hero.
Schwartzbard had fifteen family members killed in Jewish pogroms, and he, himself, had survived one such attack in 1905 during the Russian Revolution. In 1910, at age 24, he had settled in Paris and found work in a watch fatory. During the first World War, he fought with the French Foreign Legion and was wounderd at the Front. In 1917, while travelling to Odessa to join the Red Guard, he reported was told of Petliura's responsibility for pogroms in the Ukraine, which was a widely held belief among Jews.
However, historian Henry Abramson, in A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920, rejected that Petliura was directly responsible, or that he had control over an infamous 1919 attacks in Proskurov, in which 1,500 Jews were massacred. He did, however, note that Petliura may have been unable to put a stop to the pogroms, for fear of losing the loyalty of his army. Moreover, Petlura did try to stop pogroms.
Led by Henri Torres, a renowned Jewish-French jurist, the Schwartzbard defense team won acquittal by cleverly shifting the trial focus from its client to the person of Petliura, arguing that he: had orchestrated the pogroms; enjoyed the loyalty of Ukrainian troops who killed Jews while screaming "for Ukraine and Petlura"; had total control over the army. All his directives (especially Order 131), warning troops that anyone found guilty of killing innocent Jews would be executed, were ineffective, mere window dressing to impress the Western powers. Even those pogromists in the Ukrainian army who were executed, Dr. Friedman suggests, can not be attributed to Petliura. "He did nothing to prevent the killing of Jews, even when it was within his province to do so."
On February 28, 1958, the French television series "En Votre Ame et Conscience" continued the demonization process with a program devoted to the Schwartzbard Affair featuring Henri Torres. Despite vehement protests from leading Ukrainians throughout the world, no effort was made to later present the Ukrainian perspective. The program was a precursor of the infamous October 23, 1994, "60 Minutes" broadcast, "The Ugly Face of Freedom."
Over the years intrepid Ukrainian scholars have come to the defense of Symon Petliura, arguing that he was the victim of pestilential slander. Among them was Rutgers professor Taras Hunczak who somehow managed to have his views published in the journal Jewish Social Studies in 1969. In his article he reiterated two significant points: 1) Petliura was a humanist who tried to protect the Jews; 2) the various invasions of Ukraine, but especially the Bolshevik onslaught, created the kind of anarchy among the masses that made it impossible for Petliura to govern.
Today, the Hunczak perspective is finally being considered by some Jewish scholars who appear willing to reassess their views. In the recently published "A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920", a monograph published jointly by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Center and the Center for Jewish Studies, the author, Henry Abramson, writes: "Although Hunczak did not uncover any important new sources, nor did he advance any radically new arguments, he moved the level of the debate to a higher plane as he eloquently presented the case for a reappraisal of Symon Petliura and Ukrainian-Jewish relations."
Dr. Abramson writes that, in "the spirit of adversarial scholarly debate," Jewish Social Studies invited the rebuttal of Zosa Sjakowski, a longstanding proponent of the Jewish interpretation. The latter employed "inflammatory language" in his response which forced the debate to regress "to increasingly bitter personal attacks in subsequent issues." Unfortunate, but no surprise.
With the publication of his book, Dr. Abramson has once again elevated the debate regarding Otaman Petliura to a scholarly level. After reviewing the Ukrainian leader's early life, he concludes that Petliura was hardly an anti-Semite, that "he was in no way the 'architect' of the pogroms," and that directives condemning the pogroms in 1919 were effective: "recorded pogroms dropped by 37 percent in April and 85 percent in May." Although Petliura had no personal responsibility for the Jewish massacres, he was head of state, and for that reason, Dr. Abramson concludes, "he must be held accountable for the actions of his army, despite his relative lack of control over them."
The major questions in the Petliura affair revolve around culpability and Jewish Bolsheviks. Did Petliura have control over his so-called army (which included independent otamans of the most disreputable type) at a time when his entire government was confined to a moving railroad car? Is it possible that the Jewish-Bolshevik connection is not a canard? In his book "Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War", Prof. W. Bruce Lincoln addresses both questions.
"Too much of Petliura's regime seemed artificial and contrived," he writes. "As the Directory failed to replace the strict regulations of Skoropadsky" [Petliura's predecessor as ruler of Ukraine], government control collapsed. Without any effective central government, local chiefs established petty tyrannies in Kharkov, Poltava, Ekaterinoslav, Chernobyl, Radomysl and Chernigov [sic] and these neither enforced the policies of the Directory nor even agreed with them ... all these local regimes despised outside authority and hated the Jews." So much for Petliura's influence over local anti-Semitic war lords.
