On May 25, 1926, Symon Petliura was shot to death while walking down a street in Paris. He was then president-in-exile of the Ukrainian republic that had briefly existed as an independent state before the Soviet Union overran it in 1919. His assassin was Sholom Schwartzbard, a Jewish poet and revolutionary. "I killed a mass murderer," Schwartzbard told the police after his arrest.
