THE STRUGGLE OF THE NATIONALITIES 119
having non-Russian populations. Postyschevdirected particular
attention to the elimination of all Skrypnik's adherents. The
purge here was simply the execution of a mass sentence on all
the "nationally suspicious elements." Any Ukrainian who had
the courage to take the line that the country's most valuable
possession, its men and women, must be saved from destruction,
was expelled from the party and from his post, i.e. from the
possibility of earning any livelihood. About twenty-five per
cent of the members of the Ukrainian Communist Party were
thus rendered destitute; and in April 1933 ft became known
that some of them had even been arrested and executed. It is
claimed that the People's Vice-Commissary for Agriculture,
the Communist Markevitch, who had been decorated with
the highest Russian order, the Red Flag, had been secretly
condemned and shot.
The real object of the purge becomes clear from the following
statement contained in the organ of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party in the Ukraine, the Kharkov "Com-
munist" (June 2, 1933). The leading article contains this
passage: "A number of grave defects in the work of the party
in the Ukraine, most convincingly revealed by Stalin at the
session of the Central Committee in January, are clear proof
that the chief fault of the Ukrainian party organization consists
in a relaxation of Bolshevist zeal in dealing with the class
enemies. The purge has revealed certain conditions within the
party—in the All-Ukrainian Academy of Science at Kiev, in
the Wynitsa district, etc.; these, with the presence of nominal
Communists of bourgeois sympathies, and adventurers, in the
Odessa grain trust and other organizations is proof positive
that the relaxation of our party vigilance and zeal has allowed
remnants of the kulaks and adherents of Petlura to creep into
the ranks of the party* Covered by their membership cards
they attempt to weaken the dictatorship of the proletariat, to
undermine collective farming, and to divert cultural interests
into bourgeois and nationalist channels."