Born on 18 August 1886 in Izmail, south-western Ukraine, to a Jewish family, Shalom Schwartzbard (aka Samuel Schwartzbard aka Sholem Shvartsbard) remains one of the less well-known fighters of the Ukrainian Makhnovist uprising 1917-1921.

Schwartzbard was apprenticed at the age of 14 as a watchmaker. It was during this apprenticeship that he became interested in revolutionary ideas, getting involved with the local socialist group Iskra, named after the official journal of the Lenin’s Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. During the 1905 Russian Revolution, Schwartzbard was in Kruti and participated in a Jewish-run paramilitary unit, for which he was eventually arrested and imprisoned.

Released as part of a wider amnesty of political prisoners by the Tsar following the revolution, Schwartzbard fled the Russian Empire in 1906 and, while living in exile in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he became an anarchist. After repeated arrests he was forced to relocate to France in 1910.

With the outbreak of World War One, Schwartzbard joined the French Foreign Legion, during which time he was wounded and honourably discharged along with an excellent military record. Demobilised in August 1917, he returned to the Russian Republic and went to Petrograd, where he joined the Red Guards, a politically-mixed volunteer paramilitary unit often made up of peasants and factory workers (these would later be reorganised into the Red Army under Bolshevik control)

Returning to Odessa, Ukraine, he began working to set up independent anarchist schools. In 1919, however, he re-enlisted in the Red Army upon hearing reports of numerous anti-Semitic pogroms by White and Ukrainian armies, which would eventually claim the lives of approximately 50,000 Ukrainian Jews, including 14 members of Schwartzbard’s own family.

During this time, it is also thought that Schwartzbard deserted the Red Army to join the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. Indeed, the RIAU helped organise self-defence among Jewish communities under attack from pogromists and had many Jewish members including some in leading roles such as Lev Zadov, central organiser of the RIAU’s intelligence corps, the Kontrrazvedka.

In 1920, Schwartzbard returned to Paris and opened a clock and watch repair shop. The RIAU would finally be defeated by the Bolshevik Red Army in 1921. In Paris he would become active in the French labour and anarchist movements, remaining in contact with many veterans from the Russian Revolution such as Volin, Peter Arshinov and even Makhno himself.

Symon Petliura, who was head of the Directorate of the Ukrainian National Republic in 1919, had moved to Paris in 1924 and was the head of the government-in-exile of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Sholom Schwartzbard, who had lost his family in the 1919 pogroms, held Symon Petliura responsible for them. According to his autobiography, after hearing the news that Petliura had relocated to Paris, Schwartzbard became distraught and started plotting Petliura’s assassination. A picture of Petliura with Józef Piłsudski published in the Encyclopedia Larousse allowed Schwartzbard to recognize him.

On May 25, 1926, at 14:12, by the Gibert bookstore, he approached Petliura, who was walking on Rue Racine near Boulevard Saint-Michel of 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 shooting him five times and, after Petliura fell to the pavement, twice more. When the police came and asked if he had done the deed, he reportedly said, “I have killed a great assassin.” Other sources state that he attempted to fire an eighth shot into Petliura, but his firearm jammed.

The jury complied, acquiting Schwartzbard and awarding the somewhat insulting sum of one franc in damages each to Petliura’s widow and brother. In 1937, he travelled to South Africa to try and raise money for a Yiddish-language Encyclopedia. On 3 May 1938, while visiting Cape Town, Schwartzbard had a heart attack and died.

– Schwartzbard, Shalom (1886-1938)

– [Shalom Schwarzbard](https://vilnacollections.yivo.org/?ca=((item.php!id__rg-85*col__v)

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But the goalkeeper grew smaller and smaller and then changed into a ping-pong ball while the fútbol ball swelled up into a huge cast-iron ball. The iron ball circled around madly, trying to crush the ping-pong ball which darted desperately about. Could the ping-pong ball find safety without leaving the floor?

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