Schwarzbard was born in 1886 in Izmail, Bessarabia Governorate, Russian Empire[1] to the Jewish family of Itskhok Shvartsbard and Khaye Vaysberger.

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, 30 miles (48 km) north of Balta, where he was employed, in his own words, "fixing Cossack watches".

[2] 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 capitals, Vienna and Budapest.

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.

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.

[5] During the occupation and in the chaos that ensued after the Germans left, Schwarzbard lay low, survived a serious bout of typhus and worked securing facilities and supplies for the newly forming Soviet school system.

It was in this period, July–August 1919 that Schwarzbard witnessed first-hand the ruins and human devastation left by pogrom violence—images that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

In the turmoil that transpired in the period of the Russian Civil War, fourteen members of his family perished in antisemitic pogroms, including his most beloved uncle, who was killed in Ananiv.

He was acquainted with prominent anarchist activists who had emigrated from Russia and Ukraine, including such figures as Volin, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, as well as Nestor Makhno and his follower Peter Arshinov.

He contributed a number of articles to New York's anarchist daily Freie Arbeiter Stimme under the pseudonym "Sholem"—his first name, but also Yiddish for "peace", a fact he was quite proud of as an avid fan of Count Tolstoy.

[8] On 25 May 1926, at 14:12, by the Gibert bookstore, he approached Petliura, who was walking on Rue Racine near Boulevard Saint-Michel of the Latin Quarter, Paris, and asked him in Ukrainian, "Are you Mr.

His defense was led by Henri Torrès,[1] a renowned French jurist who had previously defended anarchists such as Buenaventura Durruti and Ernesto Bonomini and who also represented the Soviet consulate in France.

A notable witness for the defence was Haia Greenberg (aged 29), a local nurse who survived the pogroms in Proskurov (now renamed Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) and testified about the carnage.