Simón Radowitzky
Simón Radowitzky was a Ukrainian-Argentine anarchist militant, known for his assassination of Buenos Aires police chief Ramón Lorenzo Falcón.
Born into a poor Ukrainian Jewish family, he was radicalised into revolutionary politics from an early age. After being imprisoned for his involvement in the Russian Revolution of 1905, he emigrated to Argentina, where he found work as a mechanic and joined a local Jewish anarchist group. After witnessing a police massacre of workers during the Red Week of 1909, Radowitzky assassinated Falcón, whom he held responsible for the massacre. He admitted to the murder, but as he was a minor, he could not be sentenced to death and was instead imprisoned indefinitely. He was transferred to a prison in Ushuaia, where he spent two decades of his life.
During his imprisonment, he became a representative for his fellow inmates and a rallying figure for the Argentine anarchist movement. By 1930, persistent campaigning for clemency secured Radowitzky's release from prison. He was deported to Uruguay, where he made a new life for himself providing aid to anarchist refugees who were expelled by Argentina's military dictatorship. Radowitzky was again imprisoned in Uruguay under the dictatorship of Gabriel Terra, but after over a year of imprisonment, he was released due to a lack of evidence against him. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he went to Spain to volunteer. There, he fought in the Battle of Teruel and saved the archives of the National Confederation of Labour from the Nationalist advance. After the war, he found asylum in Mexico, where he became a citizen and lived out the rest of his life.
Biography
Early life
Simón Radowitsky was born in late 1891, in a small shtetl in the Kyiv Governorate of the Russian Empire; he came from a working-class Ukrainian Jewish family. When he was 10 years old, he began working as a blacksmith's apprentice. Radowitzky grew up amid a rising wave of antisemitic violence and heavy political repression by the Okhrana. He became involved in revolutionary politics at a young age and was imprisoned for four months after he was caught distributing political pamphlets. During the 1905 Revolution, he was wounded during a riot in Kyiv and then imprisoned for 6 months for his participation. To avoid being exiled to Siberia, he fled the country.In March 1908, he emigrated to Argentina. There he went to work as a mechanic, first for the Central Argentine Railway in Campana, then later in Buenos Aires. He ultimately settled there, living in an apartment at 194 Calle Andes. He initially worked at a Jewish-owned metal shop, but a year later, he found a better-paying job at an Italian-owned workshop. He joined a local Jewish anarchist group, Burevéstnik, which was established in May 1908 and sought to spread anarchist ideas to immigrant workers through Yiddish and Russian language publications. He also frequented the Yiddish radical library. which had been established by the Jewish anarchist group Arbeiter Fraind. Radowitzky became fluent in the Spanish language through conversations with his flatmates and acquaintances, and by reading Argentine newspapers.
Assassination of Falcón
During the Red Week of May 1909, police chief Ramón Lorenzo Falcón ordered an attack against participants in an International Workers' Day demonstration. Radowitzky was among the survivors of the attack and was described to have been clutching a scarf stained with blood. Following the attack, the demonstration escalated into a general strike. Strikers demanded Falcón's resignation, but he refused and received the support of the government. The strike ended without his resignation. Up until that day, Radowitzky had been opposed to the anarchist use of violence and propaganda of the deed. But, seeking revenge for the massacre, Radowitzky began plotting to assassinate Falcón. On 14 November 1909, Radowitzky learned of Falcón's whereabouts from a local newspaper. While Falcón was making his way back from a funeral, Radowitzky waited for him on Avenida Callao. He had prepared for any outcome, having armed himself with his Mauser pistol and dozens of bullets. He also brought along an accomplice, who stood watch on the corner of Avenida Callao and. The identity of the accomplice remains unknown, as Radowitzky covered for them by claiming sole responsibility for the attack.As Falcón's barouche made its way from Quintana and headed south down Callao, Radowitzky ran up to the car and threw a bomb inside, blowing up the carriage and killing Falcón and his secretary. He then made his escape down Avenida Alvear, chased by police officers Benigno Guzmán and Enrique Muller. He struggled to put distance between him and his pursuers, eventually attempting to escape through a construction site. He stopped for a moment to draw his revolver and then began running again, but as he ran, he was shot in the right side of his chest and collapsed.
Arrest and trial
As he lay on the ground, in pain and exhausted, the police caught up to him and pulled him up by his hair; he cried out "long live anarchism", immediately identifying himself as a foreign anarchist. As he was being arrested, he told the police that he did not care what they did to him, declaring that he had plenty more bombs for the police. Radowitzky was then taken to the 15th police precinct, where he was narrowly saved from a summary execution by the assistant superintendent, who ordered that he be transferred to the Hospital Fernández and that his bullet wound be treated. After his wound was bandaged, he was returned to the 15th precinct, put in solitary confinement and interrogated. He told the police that he was from the Russian Empire and that he was 18 years old, but nothing more.Throughout the investigation and his subsequent trial, Radowitzky refused to answer any questions about his identity. Instead, he openly bragged about his assassination of Falcón, taking full responsibility for it and outraging the prosecution. The public prosecutor, Manuel Beltrán, called Radowitzky a "helot" from the Ukrainian steppe. The prosecutor believed Radowitzky to be a born criminal due to the shape of his skull. Beltrán also claimed that Radowitzky's Jewish background made him a target of antisemitism, pushing him towards radical political views and ultimately forcing him to emigrate. The prosecutor called for the death penalty, but as Radowitzky was 18 years old, he was legally considered a minor and thus could not be executed.
The case for execution rested on determining his age, so the prosecution brought in physicians who estimated him to be 22 years old. However, his cousin Moises brought his birth certificate, which proved his status as a minor. The Argentine satirical magazine Caras y Caretas remarked that Radowitzky kept getting younger throughout the trial. Due to his young age, the judges opted to sentence him to indefinite imprisonment. They additionally stipulated that he be placed in solitary confinement and his rations restricted for three weeks each year coinciding with the anniversary of the assassination. Radowitzky spent the next 21 years of his life in prison.
Imprisonment
During his time in the National Penitentiary, Radowitzky gained the sympathy of both inmates and guards. When Radowitzky requested a drier cell, the governor offered him one that was being replastered on the condition that he finish the job. Radowitzky refused, as the bricklayers' union was on strike. He also wrote a letter to the prison's director requesting he be transferred to a different prison where he could work. On 11 January 1911, anarchists and escaped from the National Penitentiary through a tunnel. Radowitzky had been in the prison's printing shop at the time of the breakout, so was not able to join the escape. Embarrassed by the breakout and worried by Radowitzky's popularity in the prison, prison authorities blamed him for the escape. Later that year, they transferred him to Ushuaia, in the far south of the country. He arrived on 14 March and was designated convict 155. There, he was placed in the, a maximum-security prison designed to hold convicted felons and repeat offenders. He spent 19 years of his life imprisoned there.Every November, per his court order, he was put in solitary confinement and given only bread and water. Whenever he requested reading material, the prison guards brought him only the Bible. In Buenos Aires, the Argentine anarchist movement began agitating for Radowitzky's release, pressuring Hipólito Yrigoyen's newly-elected liberal government for clemency. In 1916, published a condemnation of the government's treatment of Radowitzky, declaring "pages of history are written in blood." In May 1918, published a pamphlet that paid tribute to Radowitzky and fiercely criticised the prison authorities for his mistreatment. The paper accused the prison's deputy governor, Gregorio Palacios, of torturing Radowitzky and named three guards that it alleged had sexually assaulted him. Public pressure forced Yrigoyen's government to launch an inquiry, which resulted in the three officers being suspended for "poor conduct".
Escape and recapture
As publicity about Radowitzky's imprisonment grew, some anarchists in the capital began plotting to break Radowitzky out of prison. They selected Miguel Arcángel Roscigna and Apolinario Barrera to carry out the operation; Barrera had previously been arrested in 1913 for publishing an article supporting Radowitzky. The two went to the southern Chilean city of Punta Arenas, where they linked up with members of the . They hired a small cutter crewed by Croatian sailors and sailed to Ushuaia, where they arrived on 3 November 1918. Roscigna got a job as a prison guard at the penitentiary, where he prepared Radowitzky's escape. By this time, Radowitzky had been assigned to carry out penal labour as a mechanic. On the morning of 7 November, after he had started his work the prison's workshop, Roscigna supplied him with a prison guard's uniform. He quickly changed into the disguise and, at 07:00, he walked out of the prison without any of the guards recognising him.When Radowitzky approached the cutter, Barrera initially thought he was a prison guard and drew his revolver on him, but they soon clarified each other's identities and boarded the ship. As Radowitzky was taken down the Beagle Channel, his accomplices giving him a change of clothes and two months' supplies. The plan was to leave him in a small settlement until search operations had stopped, then pick him up, but Radowitzky rejected the plan and convinced them to take him all the way to Punta Arenas. As no inmates had reported Radowitzky's escape, it took until 09:22 for a guard to discover that he had disappeared. Authorities immediately dispatched a steamboat to give chase, but the cutter managed to escape down the Ballenero Channel. News of Radowitzky's escape aroused excitement in Buenos Aires, with immediate public speculation over whether Radowitzky would be able get out of Patagonia in his condition.
After three or four days of sailing, they reached the Strait of Magellan, where they were intercepted by the Chilean Navy. Radowitzky dove into the ocean, swam 200 metres to the shore and hid. While his accomplices were detained for questioning, Radowitzky lay flat on the ground until the patrol boats left. Exhausted and freezing, he spent 7 hours walking towards Puntas Arenas. He was arrested only 12 kilometers outside the city and taken to a warship for transfer back to Ushuaia. On the night of 30 November, he arrived back at the penitentiary, where he was greeted with shouts of "Long live Simón!" by the other inmates. For the next two years, the guards held Radowitzky in solitary confinement in an underground cell and restricted his rations. Isolated and abused, Radowitzky fell so sick that he assumed he would die. In response to his ailing condition, a letter-writing campaign was initiated to demand his release. His parents, residing in Wisconsin, were among those who wrote in with their pleas. He was finally released from solitary on 7 January 1921. In total, Radowitzky spent 10 years of his imprisonment in solitary confinement.