THE STRUGGLE OF THE NATIONALITIES 113
circles. Yet generally speaking it may be claimed that Skryp-
nik's fellow-workers, like him, aimed solely at the promotion
of Ukrainian cultural interests and were glad to be able to serve
them in the Ukrainian Soviet State. The indisputable loyalty
to the Soviet of Skrypnik and the other Ukrainian Communists
fully guaranteed this—as did the presence of the Ogpu, which,
in the Ukraine as elsewhere, is, as a matter of course, always
fully informed about the relations between the local elements
and foreign countries.
A definite change in the situation took place only when the
collectivization of agriculture and all its attendant phenomena
began. The consequences were naturally felt with particular
severity in the Ukraine, as a purely agricultural region. The
ruined Ukrainian agriculture and the Ukrainian peasants were
exploited to the last degree for the maintenance of the Com-
munist regime in Great Russia. When the conditions became
more and more terrible and men began to die in multitudes,
the inevitable happened: Skrypnik and the Ukrainian Com-
munists protested openly. They stepped vigorously into the
breach on behalf of their perishing countrymen against the
fearful injury wrought by collectivization; they demanded
that the bread produced by the Ukrainian peasantry should be
used first to safeguard their own lives, and only the surplus
should be handed over to Moscow and the rest of the Soviet
Union. But the Kremlin, determined to continue its "historic
experiment," would not accept the demands of the Ukrainians
and began to see, in the rise of a national resistance movement
in the Ukraine and elsewhere, dangerous separatist tendencies.
On December 14, 1932, the Central Committee of the
Communist Party and the Council of People's Commissaries
in Moscow passed the above-mentioned resolution for the
elimination of "bourgeois nationalist" elements from all party
and Soviet organizations. Further, the Central Committee of
the Ukrainian Communist Party and the Council of Ukrainian
People's Commissaries were officially requested carefully to