112 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
Stalin's remarks at the seventeenth Party Congress are partic-
ularly illuminating. "The essence of local nationalism consists
in the tendency for the group to separate itself and shut itself up
in its own national shell; in the endeavour to cloak class conflict
within the nation; in the endeavour thus to seek protection
from Great Russian chauvinism, at the same time moving
aside from the general stream of Socialist reconstruction; in
the endeavour not to see everything which binds together and
unites the working masses of the nationalities within the
Soviet State, and to see only what separates and divides them."
If the utterances of the two representatives of Communism,
at Moscow and Kiev, are contrasted, the magnitude of the
difference in the basic views of the two tendencies within the
Communist Party will be realized; the more so since the views
of the Ukrainian Communists agree with those of many
Communists in White Russia, the Caucasus, Kazakstan, and
other districts having a non-Russian population.
Is any compromise possible between these two tendencies?
Or is it the case, as Postyschev later stated in one of his big
speeches, that the recognition of local cultural rights on a
national basis must inevitably lead to a conflict with the
principle of the international proletariat as the ultimate factor
and basis of the relation between the various peoples and the
Soviet State?
In any case it is clear that the views of Skrypnik and his
adherents have nothing to do with the machinations of any
separatists abroad. But the position taken up by the Skrypnik
group had the result that the foundation of the Ukrainian
Soviet State was followed by a vigorous increase of national-
cultural work in the Ukrainian schools, in the publication of
Ukrainian books, etc. The ci-devant bourgeois Ukrainian
intelligentsia, some of whom had been recalled from abroad,
took part in this work. Certainly there may have been among
them people who aimed at the restoration of a non-Com-
munist order and possibly were connected with certain foreign