Samuel "Sholem" Schwarzbard (, Samuil Isaakovich Shvartsburd, , ; 18 August 1886 – 3 March 1938) was a Russian-French Yiddish poet. He served in the French and Soviet military, was a communist and anarchist, and is known for organising Jewish community defense against pogroms in pre-First World War era and Russian Civil War era Ukraine, and for the assassination of Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura in 1926. He wrote poetry in Yiddish under the pen name of Baal-Khaloymes ().
Early life
Schwarzbard was born in 1886 in Izmail, Bessarabia Governorate, Russian Empire to the Jewish family of Itskhok Shvartsbard and Khaye Vaysberger. His real given name was Sholem. After the proclamation of an order by the Russian Imperial government for all Jews to move out from the region within of the border, his family moved to the town of Balta, in the southern Podolia region, where he grew up. His three older brothers died as children and his mother died whilst he was a child. In 1900, at an early age of 14 he became an apprentice to a watchmaker, Israel Dik.
During his apprenticeship in 1903, he became interested in socialism and began agitating for a revolutionary group called "Iskra", likely related to Lenin's journal of the same name. At the time of the first Russian Revolution in 1905, he was based in Kruti, north of Balta, where he was employed, in his own words, "fixing Cossack watches". A short time after participating in Jewish-run and -manned paramilitary activity while visiting his father in Balta, he was arrested and served a short stint in Proskurov and Balta prisons. He was released with the general amnesty granted as part of post-revolutionary tsarist "leniency". Fearing further arrests, Schwarzbard fled across the border into Austria-Hungary, where he lived and worked in a number of cities and towns, including the capital, Vienna, and Budapest. There, he was converted to anarchism, a political philosophy, especially the teachings of Peter Kropotkin, to which he would remain loyal the rest of his life.
France (1910–1917) In January 1910, at age 23, he settled in Paris and found work with a series of watchmakers.
First World War and injury
The day before enlisting, he married his girlfriend of three years, Anna Render, a fellow immigrant from Odesa. On 24 August 1914, Schwarzbard and his brother enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. As a legionnaire, he was sent to the front in November 1914 and participated in the Second Battle of Artois, near Arras, in May 1915. On account of his excellent military record, in early 1915, he was moved to the regular French 363rd régiment d’infanterie and transferred south to the Vosges Forest. While there, he was shot through the left lung, fracturing his scapula and tearing his brachial plexus. The doctors gave him little hope of surviving the wound, but he slowly improved over the next year and a half until he was in good enough shape to return to Russia. His left arm was left virtually useless, and he was awarded the Croix de guerre for his courage in the World War.
Russian Revolution (1917–1919) He was demobilized in August 1917 and in September, traveled with his wife to the Russian Republic, established after the February Revolution. On the French boat Melbourne, he was arrested for communist agitation and was handed over to Russian authorities in Arkhangelsk. He later traveled to Petrograd, where he joined and served in the politically mixed Red Guards (1917–1920). Schwarzbard commanded a unit of 90 sabers in the brigade of Grigory Kotovsky.
