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Ukrainian for wrongs committed by Jews against Ukrainians, or for any other reason

for that matter. If not, and I think not, then one might wonder also what the

respective statistics might be for all cross-ethnic assassinations of leaders and

officials of not only the highest rank, but of any rank as well, and to wonder

finally whether any differences in such statistics might be attributable to a

differential incitement to vengeance within Jewish and Ukrainian cultures.

Or assassinated by the Kremlin? However, crediting Bessarabian watchmaker,

Yiddish poet, and assassin Shalom Schwartzbard's claim that he murdered Petliura to

satisfy a Jewish longing for vengeance is possibly to be taken in by Kremlin

disinformation, as the following passage explains (where the spelling becomes

"Schwarzbart"):

According to Bolshevist misinformation, the Jews are to blame for the

murder of Petlura. [...]

The choice of the person who was to commit the murder has always

served as the basis for the invention of lies and legends about the

actual murder itself. They have always chosen persons to whom - in

the event of their arrest - credible tales about motives other than

the orders of the Kremlin, motives of a personal or political

character, could be imputed, so as to conceal the fact from the court

that the order to murder was issued by Moscow.

In the case of Petlura, a Jew, Schwarzbart, was instructed by Moscow

to carry out the murder. He received orders to give himself up of

his own accord to the police as a Communist agent, in order to start

a political trial in this way. Thus there was a two-fold purpose

behind this murder: to murder Petlura who was a danger to the

Bolsheviks, and to direct the political trial of this murder in such

a way that the person of Petlura and the Ukrainian government which

he represented, as well as the national liberation movement, which

was a danger to Moscow, could be defamed from the political point of

view. It was Schwarzbart's task during this trial to conceal the

part played by the Russian GPU in this murder and to pose as a

national avenger of the Jewish people for the brutal pogroms

committed against them by various anarchist groups, who operated in

Ukraine during the years of the revolution, that is from 1919 to

1921, and in the interests of Russia also fought against the

Ukrainian state. The blame for the pogroms carried out by these

groups was to be imputed to Petlura. By planning the trial in this

way the Russians managed to gain a two-fold success. In the first

place, they succeeded in winning over most of the Jews in the world

for the defence of the Communist agent Schwarzbart and in arousing

anti-Ukrainian feelings, which, incidentally, persisted a long time,

amongst the Jews, and, secondly, as a result of the unjust verdict of

the Paris court, the Russians and other enemies of an independent

Ukraine were able to obtain "the objective judgement of an impartial

court in an unprejudiced state," which could then be used in

anti-Ukrainian propaganda. For years the Russians made use of this

judgement in order to defame Petlura in the eyes of the world and to

misrepresent the Ukrainian state government which he represented and

the Ukrainian liberation movement as an anti-Semitic, destructive and

not a constructive state movement, which would be capable of ensuring

human democratic freedoms to the national minorities in Ukraine. The

jury of the Paris court, who consisted for the most part of

supporters of the popular front at that time and of socialist

liberals, refused to believe the testimony of the numerous witnesses

of various nationalities, which clearly proved that Petlura had

neither had any share in the pogroms against the Jews, nor could be

held in any way responsible for them. They ignored the actual facts

of the murder, and by their acquittal of the murderer rendered

Bolshevist Moscow an even greater service than it had expected. Thus

Moscow scored two successes. But it did not score a third, for the

Paris trial did not help Moscow to change the anti-Russian attitude

of the Ukrainians into an anti-Semitic one or to conceal its

responsibility for the murder of Petlura from the Ukrainians.

(Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura - Konovalets - Bandera,

Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, pp. 8-9)

Three reflections arise from the Schwartzbard assassination:

(1) Juror historians. One wonders whether the jurors in a criminal case are

competent to arrive at a fair determination of historical truth, or whether they are

more likely to bring with them personal convictions of historical truth which are

likely to be unshaken by the evidence.

(2) French justice. The acquittal of a self-confessed assassin might be an outcome

peculiar to French justice. Other Western states might more typically require the

conviction of a self-confessed assassin, and consult his motives only to assist in

determining the severity of sentence. A comment which in part reflects on the French

acquittal:

It is a strange paradox that the once so sacred right of asylum, even

for the spokesmen of hostile ideologies and political trends,