Schwartzbard trial

In 1919, fighting in southern Ukraine as part of the Bolshevik Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (RIAU), led by Grigori Kotovsky,[2] Sholom Schwartzbard was told that he had lost 15 members of his family in pogroms that had taken place in Odesa, Ukraine that year. He held Symon Petliura, who was the head of the Directorate of the Ukrainian National Republic, responsible for their deaths.

According to his autobiography, after hearing the news that Petliura had relocated to Paris in 1924, Schwartzbard became distraught and started plotting Petliura's assassination. A picture of Petliura with Józef Piłsudski was published in Encyclopédie Larousse and enabled Schwartzbard to recognize him.[3]

On 25 May 1926, at 14:12, by the Gilbert bookstore, he approached Petliura, who was walking on the Rue Racine near boulevard Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter, Paris, and asked him in Ukrainian, "Are you Mr. Petliura?" Petliura did not answer but raised his cane. Schwartzbard pulled out a gun and shot him five times and, after Petliura fell to the pavement, shot him twice more. When the police came and asked if he had done the deed, he reportedly said, "I have killed a great assassin".[4]

It is reported[5] that he had planned to assassinate Petliura at a gathering of Ukrainian emigrants marking Petliura's birthday, but the attempt was foiled by the anarchist Nestor Makhno, who was also at the function. Schwartzbard had told Makhno that he was terminally sick, was about to die and would take Petliura with him.[5]

The French secret service had been keeping an eye out on Schwartzbard since he had surfaced in the French capital and had noted his meetings with known Bolsheviks. During the trial, the German special services also alleged to their French counterparts that Schwartzbard had assassinated Petliura on the orders of Galip, an emissary of the Union of Ukrainian Citizens. Galip had received orders from Christian Rakovsky, an ethnic Bulgarian and a Soviet ambassador to France (1925–27), a former revolutionary leader from Romania and a former prime minister of the Ukrainian SSR. The act was according to the prosecution consolidated by Mikhail Volodin, who arrived in France on 8 August 1925 and who had been in close contact with Schwartzbard.[5][6]

Schwartzbard turned himself in to a nearby gendarme and was arrested at the site of the assassination. Lawyers César Campinchi and Henri Torres led the prosecution and the defense, respectively. After only 35 minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted Schwartzbard.[4]

The acquittal set Schwartzbard free but awarded damages of one franc each to Mme. Petliura, widow of the slain General, and to M. Petliura, his brother.

Time reported that the outcome of the trial gripped all Europe and was regarded by the Jews as establishing proof of the horrors perpetrated against their co-religionists in Ukraine under the dictatorship of Simon Petliura; radical opinion rejoiced, but the conservatives saw justice flouted and the decorum of the French courts immeasurably impaired.[4]

The French press published detailed accounts and comments relating to the court proceedings. Divergent assessments of the assassination committed by Schwartzbard coincided with the political sympathies and antipathies of the particular newspapers, which fell into three groups:

1. Those that approved of Schwartzbard stressed the pogroms of the Jewish population and, from the very outset, treated the victim of the assassination as a defendant (the most conspicuous example being the communist newspaper L'Humanité)
2. Papers restricted themselves to an exact observation of the court trial but refused to print commentaries or did so very cautiously (Le Temps, L'Ere Nouvelle or Le Petit Parisien)
3. Papers portrayed Schwartzbard's crime in an unambiguously negative light and treated the assassin predominantly as a Bolshevik agent (also centrist publications but especially the right-wing L'Intransigeant, L'Écho de Paris and L'Action Française). The French governing circles, headed by Quai d'Orsay, were not interested in granting the case further publicity, which could cause the already-tense relations with the Soviet Union to deteriorate, which the latter threatened to sever.[8]

According to a defected KGB operative Peter Deriabin, the assassination of Petliura was a special operation by the GPU, and Schwartzbard was an NKVD agent and acted on the order from a former chairman of the Soviet Ukrainian government and then-Soviet Ambassador to France, Christian Rakovsky.[9][6][10][11] Mykola Riabchuk wrote: "In fact, the trial turned into an ostentatious demonstration of retribution against Ukraine's demonized 'nationalism and separatism'; no Lubianka could ever have come up with anything better."[12]

After the Schwartzbard trial, Henri Torres was recognized as one of France's leading trial lawyers and remained active in political affairs.

After his acquittal in 1928, Schwartzbard decided to immigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. The British authorities however, refused him a visa. In 1933, he traveled the United States where he re-enacted his role in the murder on film. In 1937, Schwartzbard traveled to South Africa, where he died in Cape Town on 3 March 1938. In 1967, his remains were disinterred and transported to Israel, where he was reinterred.

• Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian who in 1921 assassinated the former Ottoman Grand Vizier and was acquitted on very similar grounds.

• Friedman, Saul S. (1976). Pogromchik: The Assassination of Simon Petlura. New York: Hart Publishing. ISBN 0805511628.
• Encyclopedia of Ukraine
  • Vol 6, pp. 2029–30. Paris–New York 1970.
  • Vol. 3, 4. "Petliura, Symon", "Schwartzbard Trial", "Pogroms". Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
• Symon Petliura; et al. (2006). Симон Петлюра: Статті, листи, документи [Symon Petliura: Articles, Letters and Documents]. Vol. 4. Ukrainian Free Academy in the United States. p. 704. ISBN 966-2911-00-6.
• Dokument Sudovoyi Pomylky (Paris: Natsionalistychne Vydavnytstvo v Evropi, 1958); "L'Assassinat de l'Hetman Petlioura." OCLC 822228432
• "L'Assassinat de l"Hetman Petlioura", Le Figaro, May 26, May 27, June 3, 1926.
• Time magazine coverage