In late 1923, faced with increased Soviet demands that Poland hand
him over, he was forced to leave for Budapest. From there he went to
Vienna and Geneva, and in late 1924 he settled in Paris. In Paris he
founded the weekly Tryzub, and from there he oversaw the activities
of the UNR government-in-exile until his assassination by a
Bessarabian Jew claiming vengeance for Petliura's purported
responsibility for the pogroms in Ukraine (see Schwartzbard Trial).
He was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.
(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ukraine,
1993, Volume III, p. 856)
The above reference to Petliura's assassin being motivated by Jewish vengeance can be
taken in two ways: literally or as part of Kremlin-manufactured plot.
Assassinated by a Jew? In the first case, if the assassination was indeed the
work of a lone Jew longing for vengeance, then it might not be amiss to wonder
whether there has ever been any great Jewish leader who has been assassinated by a
Ukrainian for wrongs committed by Jews against Ukrainians, or for any other reason
for that matter. If not, and I think not, then one might wonder also what the
respective statistics might be for all cross-ethnic assassinations of leaders and
officials of not only the highest rank, but of any rank as well, and to wonder
finally whether any differences in such statistics might be attributable to a
differential incitement to vengeance within Jewish and Ukrainian cultures.
Or assassinated by the Kremlin? However, crediting Bessarabian watchmaker,
Yiddish poet, and assassin Shalom Schwartzbard's claim that he murdered Petliura to
satisfy a Jewish longing for vengeance is possibly to be taken in by Kremlin
disinformation, as the following passage explains (where the spelling becomes
"Schwarzbart"):
According to Bolshevist misinformation, the Jews are to blame for the
murder of Petlura. [...]
The choice of the person who was to commit the murder has always
served as the basis for the invention of lies and legends about the
actual murder itself. They have always chosen persons to whom - in
the event of their arrest - credible tales about motives other than
the orders of the Kremlin, motives of a personal or political
character, could be imputed, so as to conceal the fact from the court
that the order to murder was issued by Moscow.
In the case of Petlura, a Jew, Schwarzbart, was instructed by Moscow
to carry out the murder. He received orders to give himself up of
his own accord to the police as a Communist agent, in order to start
a political trial in this way. Thus there was a two-fold purpose
behind this murder: to murder Petlura who was a danger to the
Bolsheviks, and to direct the political trial of this murder in such
a way that the person of Petlura and the Ukrainian government which
he represented, as well as the national liberation movement, which
was a danger to Moscow, could be defamed from the political point of
view. It was Schwarzbart's task during this trial to conceal the
part played by the Russian GPU in this murder and to pose as a
national avenger of the Jewish people for the brutal pogroms
committed against them by various anarchist groups, who operated in
Ukraine during the years of the revolution, that is from 1919 to