Poets, according to a famous statement by Percy Shelley, are the world’s “unacknowledged legislators.” Literary critics might debate whether Shelley’s phrase applies to the Yiddish anarchist poet Sholem Schwarzbard, but even if Schwarzbard wasn’t an “unacknowledged legislator,” he certainly was an acknowledged assassin.

On May 25, 1926, Schwarzbard shot and killed the Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura on the streets of Paris, where both men were living as exiles from their native Ukraine. Schwarzbard’s motive was straightforward: he blamed Petliura for the deadly pogroms against Jews that had taken place some seven years earlier, during the bloody and chaotic Russian Civil War (1918–1921).

As leader of the Directory, the government of the ephemeral Ukrainian People’s Republic, Petliura — a journalist and poet himself — commanded armies that committed a variety of gruesome anti-Jewish atrocities. Far from evading responsibility for his act of revenge, Schwarzbard allegedly proclaimed that he had “killed a great assassin” before being apprehended by the police.