Pogromchik : the assassination of Simon Petlura
Examines the trial of Shalom Schwarzbard, held in Paris in October 1927. His trial for the murder of Petlyura (in May 1926) turned out to be not only an investigation of Schwarzbard's personality and motives, but also of the pogroms perpetrated by Petlyura's army in Ukraine in 1919. The prosecution depicted Schwarzbard as a Bolshevik agent or as an insane man, and ascribed the massacres to the anarchy that reigned in Ukraine. The defense attorney argued that Schwarzbard's action was a necessary act of defense against a murderer. Dwells on the pogrom of February 1919 in Proskurov (now Khmelnytskyi), as well as on bloody pogroms in Zhitomir, Ovruch, etc. The main question debated at the trial was to what extent Petlyura was responsible for the crimes committed by his army. States that Petlyura was by far not the only pogromist during the civil war in Ukraine (1918-20): semi-independent chieftains, like Kozyr-Zyrko, Struk, and others were no less brutal murderers of Jews than Petlyura's "generals". The jury and the judge agreed on the full responsibility of Petlyura for the murders, and acquitted Schwarzbard, referring to similar trials in Europe at the time, and to the fact that the independent Ukrainian state of 1918-19 was an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Jewish public opinion worldwide and many leading non-Jewish and Jewish intellectuals supported Schwarzbard, but the major French newspapers supported the prosecution. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism)
Print Book, English, 1976
Hart Pub. Co., New York, 1976