Petliura – 100 Years After His Assassination, Still Awaits Proper Recognition
Symon Petliura, leader of Ukraine’s 1918–20 independence struggle, was assassinated in Paris in 1926 by Sholem Schwarzbard, who claimed to avenge Jewish victims of pogroms committed by undisciplined forces nominally under Petliura’s command. The trial turned Petliura into a symbol of blame, overshad
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On a spring afternoon in Paris, May 25, 1926, a Jewish watchmaker named Sholem Schwarzbard approached a middle-aged man browsing books at a sidewalk stall on the Rue Racine in central Paris. He drew a revolver and fired five shots into the back of Ukrainian national leader in exile, Symon Petliura.
Schwarzbard did not run. He remained on the spot and told the police he had killed a murderer.
Genuine vengeance or staged political theatre inspired by Moscow?
Schwarzbard claimed he was avenging the dead.
During Ukraine’s armed struggle for independence, which occurred while Russia’s “Civil War between Reds and Whites” was happening, thousands of Jews were murdered in pogroms – massacres perpetrated by multiple forces: White Russian armies, Bolshevik Red Army detachments, disparate Ukrainian nationalist units, and independent gangs exploiting the chaos.
Yet Schwarzbard’s assassination and subsequent trial deliberately crystallized blame on Petliura’s name alone, making him the face of the entire catastrophe.
To Ukrainians, Petliura was a visionary leader who commanded the armies of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic in its desperate struggle for independence against Bolshevik conquest.
He was certainly no extremist or anti-Semite. A democrat, socialist, journalist, literary scholar, symbol of resistance against Russian imperialism, in 1918, he even led a revolt against the brief German-backed conservative Ukrainian government of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.
The Warsaw Pact was created 71 years ago, on May 14 . After the collapse of the Soviet Union it dissolved and many of those countries are now in NATO. More recently, Moscow tried to form an Asian Version of the Warsaw pact, Collective Security Treaty Organization, which also proved to be fragile. Now all of Moscow’s allies must bear in mind Moscow’s inherent untrustworthiness.
To many Jews, however, Petliura’s name came to evoke something far darker: the pogroms of 1918-1920, when unruly forces under his nominal command massacred Jewish civilians. For them, Schwarzbard was not a murderer but an avenger – a man who struck down a pogromist when no court would hold him accountable.
A French jury agreed. In October 1927, after a sensational and much-publicized trial that put Ukrainian nationalism itself in the dock, Schwarzbard walked free.
But was justice served? And who, truly, was Symon Petliura – hero or villain, liberator or butcher? And what was the nature of the movement he represented? Chauvinist and ruthless – or a hastily assembled ramshackle force of patriotic volunteers that had never been a disciplined modern army.
A century on, as Ukraine once again fights for its survival against Russian aggression, these questions demand conclusive answers.
The man who stood for a free Ukraine
Petliura emerged from the chaos of 1917 when the Tsarist Russian empire was collapsing as a key organizer of Ukrainian military forces. The 38-year-old journalist and socialist activist was elected chairman of the Ukrainian General Military Committee in May 1917 by Ukraine’s nascent parliament, the Central Rada. By 1919, he dominated the Directory, the governing body of the Ukrainian National Republic, and served as supreme commander of its armed forces.
His vision was clear: an independent, democratic Ukraine, free from both Russian imperial domination and Bolshevik totalitarianism. He stood for parliamentary democracy, land reform and national self-determination at a time when such ideals appeared within reach.
But the window shut quickly. Ukraine was surrounded by enemies: the Red Army to the east, Polish forces to the west, White Russian armies that did not recognize Ukrainian independence. Petliura’s forces fought on multiple fronts with insufficient resources and manpower.
By 1920, despite a temporary alliance with Poland, which cost him the support of western Ukrainians rejecting Polish domination, the Bolsheviks conquered Ukraine, incorporating it into the Soviet Union as a nominally “independent” constituent republic – in reality, a colony.
Petliura ended up in Paris, where he led a government-in-exile and remained until his assassination in 1926.
The shadow of the pogroms
As supreme commander of Ukrainian forces, Petliura issued no direct orders to kill Jews and proclaimed condemnations of the violence. Historians continue to debate the degree of his culpability. Nevertheless, the 1927 trial of Schwarzbard transformed into a judgment on Ukrainian nationalism itself, with the jury’s acquittal serving as a moral statement about those pogroms rather than a legal verdict on Petliura’s specific guilt.
Was Schwarzbard a Soviet agent?
Petliura was despised by Russians, whether communists, monarchists or liberals as an enemy. For example, the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, a native of Kyiv, depicted Petliura in his novel “The White Guard” as the leader of Ukrainian peasant barbarism. Incidentally, most of this work was first published in Moscow in 1925 and the full version in Paris – where there was a large Russian émigré community – in 1927. Back in Moscow, the play adaption of the novel – “The Days of the Turbins” – became Iosif Stalin’s favorite play.
So, was Schwarzbard an independent anarchist seeking personal revenge, or a Soviet operative eliminating a political threat? The evidence remains inconclusive.
Ukrainians have long contended that Moscow sent Schwarzbard. A defected KGB operative, Peter Deriabin, later claimed Schwarzbard was indeed a Soviet agent. Schwarzbard had served in the Bolshevik Red Guard during the Civil War, making recruitment plausible.
And the assassination fits a pattern: Moscow systematically eliminated Ukrainian nationalist leaders abroad – Yevhen Konovalets in Rotterdam in 1938, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera in Munich in the 1950s. If Schwarzbard was the first, what followed was a decades-long campaign of political murder.
Whether intentional or coincidental, the result was the same: Petliura’s death removed a symbol of Ukrainian resistance and established a template Moscow would follow for decades.
As for Schwarzbard, after his acquittal, he emigrated and eventually died in South Africa in 1938, taking any secrets to his grave.
How Russia weaponized History
Today, Russia continues to invoke Petliura and the pogroms as evidence that Ukrainian nationalism is fundamentally dangerous and illegitimate. The Kremlin’s absurd claim that it is “denazifying” Ukraine echoes Soviet-era propaganda.
Russia uses the memory of Jewish suffering to justify its own imperial conquest of Ukraine – even as Ukraine’s democratically elected president is himself Jewish.
The Melnyk precedent
Ukraine’s reclamation of Petliura is already underway. A street bearing his name leads from Kyiv’s central station, and a modest monument marks its terminus – recognition that falls short of his historical significance.
This month, President Volodymyr Zelensky presided over the state repatriation of the remains of another nationalist hero – Andrii Melnyk’s – to Kyiv with full honors, placing them in Ukraine’s new national Pantheon.
Melnyk (1890-1964), a western Ukrainian military colleague of Petliura, founded the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Vienna 1929 with Konovalets and others. He became the leader of one of its factions, the other being headed by Stepan Bandera.
Like his colleagues who were opposed to both Polish domination and Soviet totalitarian rule, Melnyk collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II but was made brutally aware that Hitler had no time for an independent Ukraine.
Indeed, one of his best-known supporters, the poet Olena Telha and her husband were executed in Babyn Yar, the same site where the Nazis shot some 30,000 Jews after capturing Kyiv in September 1941. He himself was imprisoned for several months in 1944.
Ukraine should also bring Petliura’s remains home. Today, Ukrainians are dying to defend the independence Petliura fought for in 1918-20. They deserve a Pantheon that tells the complete truth – complicated, contested, but undeniably theirs.
And, as a prelude, Jan. 22, the date on which in 1918 the revolutionary parliament, the Central Rada, in which Petliura was one of the key figures, declared Ukraine’s independence, should be made a national holiday.
A statue of Petliura, and those of many other national heroes, are still missing in Kyiv. Ukraine’s children need to know that their nation’s right to exist does not depend on finding flawless heroes. It depends on the courage to claim a difficult history and the resolve to never surrender the independence their ancestors died defending.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.
