Five gunshots fired on a busy Paris street in broad daylight set the scene for a controversial murder trial. A Jewish watchmaker confessed to the crime, but the resulting proceedings tried the victim rather than his killer, giving the casualties of Ukraine’s post-WWI pogroms a voice at last

How does an anonymous, run-of-the-mill watchmaker turn into a mystery man overnight, a poet, thinker, and anarchist whose reinterment in Israel was attended by none other than Menahem Begin and whose name graces major Israeli thoroughfares? He simply chooses a vicious anti-Semite responsible for the deaths of countless Jews, assassinates him as publicly as possible, confesses, and then walks away scott-free. That, in a nutshell, is the story of Shalom Schwarzbard, “The Avenger,” as the Jerusalem street honoring him is called.

 

Armies of All Colors

It’s 1917 and World War I is drawing to a close. In Russia, Nicholas II has been arrested with his family and stripped of his powers. A provisional, liberal government presides in conjunction with workers’ councils – known as soviets – established throughout the former tsarist empire. On April 3, exiled Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returned to the capital (renamed Petrograd), signaling his party’s shift from cooperation with the acting government to a more radical stance.

Demanding that said government be replaced by proletariat rule, Lenin launched the October Revolution, and the Bolsheviks seized power. Though Russia’s French and British allies objected, the Bolsheviks signed a cease-fire agreement with Germany and began peace talks. A few days after the coup in Petrograd, the Bolshevik Red Guards took Moscow and other major cities, where they enjoyed the support of the large working class. Elsewhere in vast Imperial Russia, however, they struggled to gain the upper hand; civil war broke out in full force, and pandemonium ensued.

At the same time, a different drama was playing out in the western half of the former empire. Changing hands since the 13th century, Ukraine had been conquered first by Mongols, then by Lithuania, annexed by Poland as part of a family inheritance, and devastated by Cossack rebellions in the 1600s. By the late 18th century, Ukraine had been divvied up between Turkey, Russia, and Austria. Their treaty suppressed the Ukrainian nationalist movement, which lay dormant until opportunity knocked in the shape of the Russian descent into chaos. In the wake of the October Revolution, Ukraine declared independence.

Symon Petliura was a hero of this chapter of Ukrainian history. Minister of War in the republic’s first government, commander in chief within the directorate that controlled an embattled Ukraine, and the final, self-proclaimed head of state within the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, Petliura wielded power ruthlessly to stabilize his position. 

Four armies fought over Ukraine: the Soviet Red Army, commanded by Leon Trotsky; the White Army, which opposed it; the Black Army, led by Ukrainian anarchist communist Nestor Makhno, who ruled southern Ukraine; and the Ukrainian nationalists, under Petliura. All parties frequently switched sides, so Petliura first battled the Whites, then allied with them against the Reds. 

In 1919, the Bolsheviks prevailed, winning victory after victory. His back against the wall, Petliura signed an agreement with the Polish leader and commander in chief, Marshal Józef Piłsudski. After a few joint successes, this alliance too petered out, and Petliura fled, first to Poland and then – in 1921 – to Paris. The web of insurrection he’d spun in Ukraine failed to give his country independence, but its threads ensnared another nation – the Jews.

 

Born Anti-Semites

The Jews of Ukraine were used to persecution. A hundred thousand of them were slaughtered in the east during Bogdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossack uprisings of 1648 (and immortalized in the liturgical laments of 9 Av). The Cossacks’ handiwork was continued in the 18th century by the Haidamacks, runaway serfs and other brigands who attacked Jewish communities mercilessly with cries of “Out with the landowners and the Jews!” The bloodshed claimed the lives of some sixty thousand Jews, culminating in a 1768 massacre in Uman.

After much of Ukraine was annexed by Russia, there were periodic, governmentinstigated pogroms. The most infamous (though not necessarily the worst) occurred in 1881–82, sparking a mass migration of Jews from the Pale of Settlement to the U.S. and Argentina and turning many toward Zionism. After the Kishinev riots of 1903, Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote In the City of Slaughter and On the Slaughter, the two poems that made him the voice of the Jewish people.

In 1917, the region’s two million Jews pinned their hopes on the People’s Republic of Ukraine, which declared independence from Russia after the October Revolution. They hoped the new polity would end their sufferings under the yoke of Imperial Russia, and at first things indeed looked promising: the Ukrainian parliament included fifty representatives of Jewish political parties, and Jews were granted cultural and organizational autonomy. The government appointed a bureau for Jewish issues, headed by Jewish ministers. Many Russian Jews moved to Ukraine to enjoy these early changes – only to find themselves trapped in the heart of darkness.

Capitalizing on Ukraine’s deep-seated anti-Semitism, Petliura named his regiments for renowned butchers of Jews, such as Khmelnytsky and his ilk. From the outset, the commander granted his men free rein against the helpless Jewish population. When Red Army victories wrested much of Ukraine from his grip in 1919, arousing the ancient grievances that had prompted Ukrainians to slaughter Jews for generations, Petliura compensated for his failures with the oldest trick in the book: fanning the flames of xenophobia, he gave the masses license to rob, rape, torture, and murder Jews. 

At first the pogroms were spontaneous, breaking out wherever roving gangs and mob violence followed in the soldiers’ wake. But Petliura soon made them routine: First a Ukrainian regiment would arrive in town and accuse the Jews of supporting the Bolshevik regime. After fining the community millions of rubles, the soldiers would be given a free hand, resulting in atrocities on an unprecedented scale. Then the villagers moved in, systematically scavenging anything reusable from the vacant homes and leaving whole rows of them windowless and roofless.

From the autumn of 1917 until the spring of 1921, there were roughly two thousand pogroms in seven hundred Jewish communities. The death toll, including lives lost to epidemics among the fleeing refugees, approached one hundred thousand.