The Assassination of Symon Petliura: Understanding Ukraine’s Past. — A Brief History.
The end of Ukraine’s first exiled President.
It is the 25th of May, 1926 and Symon Petliura, the president in exile of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, is taking a stroll through Paris. At roughly 2.12pm, he passes by the Gilbert Bookstore, near Boulevard Saint-Michel, in the Latin Quarter of Paris. At this time, a man approaches him and speaks to him in his native Ukrainian tongue. “Are you Mr. Petliura?” the man asks him. There is no reply, instead Symon Petliura simply raises his walking cane in response to the question. The man quickly pulls out a gun, before he shouts at Petliura. “Dirty dog, killer of my people, defend yourself!” He then fires his weapon five times, before his victim falls to the floor.
The gunman’s name was Sholom Schwartzbard, a known Ukrainian ‘anarchist’ of Jewish descent. After killing the President in exile, he quickly handed himself in to the police and presented them with a note that confessed to his crime. This note is believed to have read: “I have killed Petliura to avenge the death of the thousands of pogrom victims in the Ukraine who were massacred by Petliura’s forces without his taking any steps to prevent these massacres.”
