Culture

The many deaths of Symon Petliura

A century ago, on May 25, 1926, an otherwise ordinary afternoon in Paris’ bohemian Latin Quarter was disrupted by a barrage of gunshots, leaving one of Ukraine’s famous military leaders dead in the street. “I emptied my revolver,” Samuel “Scholem” Schwartzbard, the Jewish-Ukrainian man who killed Symon Petliura, told the court, as quoted by Time magazine in 1927. “A policeman came up quietly and said: ‘Is that enough?’ I answered: ‘Yes.’ He said: ‘Then give me your revolver.’ I gave him the re