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Title: A Makhnovist in Africa Author: Michael Schmidt Date: May 2004 Language: en Topics: Shalom Schwartzbard, Makhnovists, Africa, Jewish anarchism Source: Retrieved on 1st August 2020 from http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/schwartzbard.htm Notes: Zabalaza, A Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism, No.5 — May 2004
One of the lesser-known heroes of the Ukrainian Revolution 1917–1921 was
Shalom (Samuel) Schwartzbard, whose name is alternately given as Sholem
Shvartsbard. Hailing from Bessarabia (Moravia) where he was born in
1886, Schwartzbard worked periodically as a watchmaker. He became a
revolutionary during the Russian Revolt of 1905 that affected all
Russian-occupied territories like Bessarabia — and Poland, where the
political prisoner-support organisation the Anarchist Red Cross (later
renamed the Anarchist Black Cross, ABC) was founded in that year.
He fled Bessarabia in 1906 following the collapse of the revolt and
moved to France in 1910, joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914 on the
outbreak of the First World War, was wounded and honourably discharged.
He returned to Odessa, Ukraine, in 1917. Although it is not know whether
or not Schwartzbard was a convinced Anarchist, after the outbreak of the
revolution he put his legionnaire experience to good use as a guerrilla
in the anarchist communist Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine
(RIAU) — known as the Makhnovists. The RIAU liberated some 7 million
people in the southern Ukraine and controlled large swathes of territory
in a battle on five fronts: against the Ukrainian bourgeois
nationalists; the Austro-Hungarian invaders; the counter-revolutionary
White Armies; the Bolshevik Red Army; and roving bandit gangs.
Some historians claim that Schwartzbard was rather a member of the Red
Army, which may either be the usual communist tactic of claiming key
activists as their own, or may in fact have been partially true, because
many Red Army members deserted to the RIAU which boasted equality among
its guerrillas.
In 1919, 14 members of Schwartzbard’s family were slaughtered in an
anti-Jewish pogrom allegedly initiated by Symon Petliura, chairman of
the bourgeois Ukrainian National Republic between 1918 and 1920 — one of
the Makhnovists’ primary enemies.
As many as 60,000 Ukrainian Jews lost their lives in pogroms at this
time. Schwartzbard was involved as an RIAU guerrilla in organising the
self-defence of Jewish rural communities against attack, much the same
work that the ABC did in the cities.
Historians differ over whether Petliura was personally responsible for
the pogroms, but he certainly did little to stop them. In contrast, the
RIAU was sternly anti-pogromist, numbered many leading Jewish anarchists
in its ranks and publicly assassinated those — including any of its own
guerrillas — that it found responsible for having conducted pogroms.
Schwartzbard returned to Paris in 1920. The RIAU was finally defeated by
the Red Army in 1921 and the Ukrainian Revolution was crushed by red
reactionaries — and red revolutionaries who were lied to by the
Bolshevik bureaucracy that the RIAU was a white, pogromist bandit force.
Many RIAU survivors, including the brilliant guerrilla warfare
strategist Nestor Makhno, also settled in Paris. Makhno went on to
co-author the “Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists”,
which re-emphasised the anarchist mass organisational tradition by
calling for them to be ideologically and tactically unified in their
organisations. The “Platform” has inspired numerous anarchist
organisations across the world, including the ZACF here in southern
Africa.
Meanwhile, Petliura, who had struck up a friendship with Polish leader
Jozef Piłsudski (who later staged a coup d’etat in May 1926), fled
Poland in disguise in 1923, travelling via Budapest, Zurich and Geneva
to Paris where he settled in October 1924.
There, in the Latin Quarter, he headed up the UNR government-in-exile
and published the paper “Tryzub” (Trident). Schwartzbard gained French
citizenship in 1925.
Schwartzbard became aware that Petliura was also living in Paris and he
began to stalk the UNR leader. On 26 May 1926, Schwartzbard assassinated
Petliura in broad daylight as he was walking in the street, proclaiming
loudly as he fired his fatal shots that he was avenging the pogroms.
Schwartzbard waited quietly at the scene for the police to arrest him.
He was put on trial for murder and defended by the famed North African
leftist lawyer Henri Torres. Described by one of his enemies as “a
communist, an anarchist... who is never indifferent”, Torres had
previously successfully defended the famous Spanish anarchist guerrillas
Buenaventura Durruti, Francisco Ascaso and Gregorio Jover, plus the
Catalan separatist Francisco Macia, during the Primo de Rivera
dictatorship. He later went on to defeat a charge in 1951 against
CNT-in-exile secretary-general Jose Peirats (author of the
anarcho-syndicalist CNT’s “official” account of Spain, “Anarchists in
the Spanish Revolution”) and two other CNT leaders despite Torres having
joined the French Communist Party.
The prosecution suggested that Schwartzbard was actually acting on
behalf of Soviet intelligence, and that he knew OGPU agent Mikhail
Volodin. OGPU was the Unified State Political Administration, Stalin’s
restructuring of the notorious Bolshevik Cheka death-squad/political
terrorism organisation that had been responsible for the murder and
detention of so many anarchists during the Bolshevik counter-revolutions
in Russia and Ukraine.
The prosecution alleged that Schwartzbard was a pawn in a Stalinist plot
to prevent the resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism by assassinating the
UNR leader. But Schwartzbard’s origins make this seem unlikely. In any
case, the assertion of an OGPU link was never proven and Schwartzbard
was acquitted by a French jury on the grounds that he had committed a
“crime of passion”.
The sensational trial and acquittal was covered in the world’s major
newspapers and Schwartzbard became famous. But he preferred obscurity
and it was as a travelling salesman for a Yiddish encyclopaedia that he
visited Cape Town in 1938.
By this stage, he was well-known in Yiddish-speaking circles for his
poetry and his writings, notably: “Troymen un Virklikhkayt” (Dreams and
Reality), 1920; “In Krig — Mit Zikh Aleyn” (At War — With Myself), 1933;
and his autobiography “In’m Loyd Fun Yorn” (In the Course of Years),
1934.
He had only been in South Africa for a month when he suffered a heart
attack and died. He was buried with great ceremony at the Maitland
Jewish Cemetery in the largest public funeral held in Cape Town to that
date.
Schwartzbard had previously applied for the right to settle in
British-occupied Palestine, but had been refused. So in 1967, a
committee established in Israel arranged for Schwartzbard’s remains to
be disinterred and reburied in the Heroes’ Acre at Natanya, a
resting-place for Jewish military heroes. But his original grave-stone
can still be visited at Maitland where every year, the local Jewish
community performs a ceremony in remembrance of him.
In May 2000, South African anarchists visited the place in the Père
Lachaise cemetery in Paris where Makhno’s ashes are interred and
inserted a Zulu-language anarchist pamphlet into the flower-holder in
honour of how far afield Makhnovist ideas have spread since the 1930s.
In similar fashion, we honour the memory of Shalom Schwartzbard for the
direct action he took against racist oppressors.