searches and seizures of foodstuffs, a policy for which the Moscow Central
Committee and Stalin personally were responsible, the famine reached its
height in the spring of 1933. At the same time, the nationally minded wing of
the Communist Party of Ukraine was purged, and often its members were
arrested as spies and wreckers. All manifestations of Ukrainian cultural
distinctiveness were suppressed. The study of Ukrainian history disappeared
for a generation. Even the spelling rules of the Ukrainian language were
changed in order to bring the language closer to Russian, while those
responsible for the Ukrainian cultural attainments of the 1920s were arrested.
Ukrainization was abandoned and replaced by a policy of Russiflcation.

The Stalin-Postyshev policy of the 1930s may be summarized as follows:

1. The destruction of the Ukrainian national cultural leadership, the non-
Communist institutions in which they functioned, and their attain-
ments

2. The destruction of the nationally minded Communist elite

3. The abandonment of Ukrainization and reinstitution of Russification in
cities, which pushed Ukrainian national culture out of the cities and
back to the countryside whence it had come

4. The government-created famine, which dealt a body blow to the
traditional mass constituency of Ukrainian national self-assertion, the
Ukrainian villages

All this may be summarized as part of an attempt to neutralize the
Ukrainian nation as a political factor within the Soviet Union by destroying it
as a sociological entity.

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