THE STRUGGLE OF THE NATIONALITIES 125
leniency (in contrast to the People's Commissary for Supply,
Mikoian, who had been so shocked by conditions as he found
them in Kiev as early as Easter that he had all the army stores
handed over to the population at twenty distributing centres),
All resistance had now been broken.
But the enforced silence did not really mean the end of the
nationalist movement in the Ukraine, nor did it prove that the
will to preserve the national individuality had been crushed.
On March 2, 1934$ Pravda reported that "5,000 different
persons" had been recalled from the village Soviets of the Kiev
district because "they were unworthy to be members of the
Soviets." The same issue reported that in Soviet Armenia two
hundred members of the party, including ninety presidents of
local councils, had been removed, whence Pravda concluded
that "everything was not yet in order." The purge, in other
words, was continuing systematically, and thousands of local
officials were being displaced in favour of more docile elements.
With this end in view the Soviet Government took another
important step. In the speech mentioned previously, the
Commissary for Agriculture, Jakovliev? mentioned that a
special commission existed at Moscow under his chairmanship
whose function it was to confirm the appointment of directors,
senior agricultural experts, accountants* etc., at the motor and
tractor stations of the entire Soviet Union, and that from 20 to
50 per cent of these local officials had already been removed.
The Moscow Commission confirms and does not appoint; yet
clearly in practice Moscow can interfere in the most important
agricultural appointments made by the local authorities. In
other words, the right of the autonomous districts to appoint
their own officials has become illusory: Moscow despatches
its servants into the districts, and it is they who control every-
thing down to the most inferior posts. Often the local autho-
rities oppose the new arrivals, and although passive resistance
is their only weapon., the struggle is a hard one. This friction
between local officials and the men of Moscow appears from