io8 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
position altogether. The local Communists resisted, as far as
possible, the drastic measures for the collection of grain in their
starving districts. And so, in due course, the "fight for bread'5
came to be accompanied by the "fight against local nationalist
tendencies" as the real foundation of the machinations of all
enemies of the State, kulaks and grain saboteurs. A reckoning
with the local Communists, to whom this development was
due, though long avoided, had now become inevitable; and
at last the Government proceeded to eliminate every stressing
of local and national peculiarity as inimical to the State and the
regime. A tardy justice was done to one of the first demands of
theoretical Communism. Naturally the fight was fiercest in
the Ukraine, which, next to Great Russia, is the biggest of the
federative republics of the Soviet State.
At the last Communist Congress at Moscow the repre-
sentatives of the various districts inhabited by distinct nationali-
ties rose one after another and declared that, in the collection
of the harvest and the fight against national movements, things
had gone exactly as Postyschev had expounded in his great
speech before the Congress about the Ukraine. Gikalo spoke
for White Russia, Mirsoian for Kazakstan, and so on. And,
indeed, events in the various regions simply were a reflection
of the happenings in the Ukraine. Thanks to Postyschev's
statement and other reports from Soviet sources, much more
is known about developments in the Ukraine than in the case of
many other regions. It will, therefore, be expedient to describe
the course of events in the Ukraine and, having taken this
region as an example, to deal briefly with the course of events
among the White Russians, Georgians, Germans, Jews, etc.
It is superfluous here to take sides in the dispute whether the
Ukrainians are an independent people or, as many Russians
claim, are only one tribe of those that form the Russian nation.
It is enough to say that to-day even nationalist Russians mostly-
hold the view that Ukrainian claims to ethnographical indi-
viduality and hence to freedom to develop on local cultural