May 2: Simon Radowitzky

Ukrainian-born anarchist Simon Radowitzky, a refugee in Argentina from the repressed Russian revolution of 1905, assassinated Ramon Falcon, the Argentine chief of police, on this date in 1909. Falcon had led a deadly cavalry charge against workers in a May Day demonstration, killing twelve and seriously wounding a hundred, before inaugurating a week of deadly repression against “Russian Jewish instigators.” Radowitzky, 18, ambushed Falcon’s carriage with a bomb. He was exempted from the death penalty because of his age, but instead was subjected to two decades of dreadful imprisonment in the Ushuaia penitentiary in Patagonia, where he was raped repeatedly by his guards and subjected to more than two years of solitary confinement. Radowitzky nevertheless became a spokesperson for the prisoners of Ushuaia, leading them in hunger strikes and other forms of protest. In 1930 he was expelled from Argentina to Uruguay, where he was again imprisoned for his political activity. After fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he spent the final sixteen years of his life in Mexico.

“In Argentina, the powerful have always tried to ignore this figure that seems like an escapee from a Dostoevsky novel. He had raised his hand to eliminate a tyrant and later on in life behaved as a man of extreme kindness and solidarity with those that suffer.” —Quinlan Vos