254 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
views are summed up in the following terms: "Thus, by an
apparent paradox, a fundamentally internationalistic regime is
combined with a regime of nationalities allowing for the
intellectual expansion of the various peoples."
M. Herriot makes this statement on the strength of his
observations in the Ukraine—the only part of Russia which he
really visited., apart from Moscow—and with explicit reference
to his former declarations on the position of the Ukrainians.
At the time when he arrived at Kiev the death of the
Communist Skrypnik, a former political friend of Lenin,
had become common knowledge. Postyschev had delivered
his notorious Kharkov speech, and the entire country was
trembling under the campaign then being initiated by Moscow
and being carried out by Postyschev against the nationalistic
movement among the Ukrainian population and against the
hundreds and thousands of Ukrainian Communists who, like
Skrypnik, were demanding the recognition of the national and
cultural individuality of their people. It may be mentioned that
similar campaigns were carried through in White Russia,
Kazakstan and other parts of the Soviet Union. M. Herriot,
meanwhile, was proclaiming that the demands of the centre
and those of local nationalism—in the present case, the claim
for nationalist or intellectual expansion in the Ukraine—had
been harmonized in actual fact. But here again we must insist
that a visit to the Ukrainian Academy of Science at Kiev (an
institution which immediately on his departure became the
object of Postyschev*s most insistent attentions), a talk with
Comrade Tschubar (whom Postyschev entrusted with the post
formerly held by Skrypnik) and other conversations with
exponents of the Moscow regime give M. Herriot no right to
"instruct" world public opinion on the position in the Ukraine.
But there is another and more regrettable aspect of M.
Harriotts proceedings. Embarrassed by the controversy on the
Russian position and especially on the famine in the Ukraine,
he made the following statement in a lecture given in the