economic base, similar to that of Ukraine, but one which would lie in the middle of Russia, far from external threats. The Ural-Kuznets Basin was to become such a base.

At this time, it is noteworthy to point out, that the start of the implementation of the first five-year plan (1928) coincided with the establishment and development of Soviet concentration camps. This system provided the country with a large cheap labor force that was needed for the actualization of the plan. The following numbers give ample evidence of the development of the concentration camp system: 6,000 prisoners in the camps in 1922; 200,000 in 1927; 2,500,000 in 1930; 4,500,000 in 1933;
and 7,800,000 in 1936.6

Simultaneously, Moscow tightened its control over Ukraine by intensifying its fight against “Ukrainian nationalism” and Ukrainian aspirations for independence. This type of battle, based on Marxist ideology, found support not only among party mem¬bers within the U.S.S.R., but also among supporters of Marxism and socialism outside Soviet borders.

Accordingly, Russian Soviet rulers thought that rich peasants (kulaks) and the Uk¬rainian peasantry as a whole—that is, “individual rural households”—were, in fact, “the social base for Ukrainian nationalism”7. Therefore, it was necessary to destroy this base. In addition, in the eyes of the authorities, “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists acted as staunch enemies of the politics of socialist industrialization”; they even had their own agency in the Communist Party8. Ukrainian nationalism was proclaimed a principal enemy of the socialist state.

The first attacks were directed against the intelligentsia. In 1929, the Soviet militia arrested large numbers of Ukrainians; among them were seventeen members and cor¬respondents of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (S. Yefremov, Ye. Hermayze, H. Holoskevych, and others), and twenty-seven renowned cultural activists (L. Starytska-Cherniakhivska, V. Chekhivskyi, A. Ninovskyi, and others). They were charged with membership in an illegal organization (Association for the Liberation of Ukraine, the S.V.U.) and sentenced at public trials in Kharkiv (the capital of Soviet Ukraine at that time) in March and April of 1930. Their activism was presented as participation in the service of foreign governments with the intention of separating Ukraine from the U.S.S.R.

At the same time, Soviet Russian authorities had also culminated the destruction of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Its bishops and most of the clergy were arrested or exiled.

The next attack was on the rural areas. During the “liquidation of the kulak classes (1930-1931), an incredible reign of terror was instituted in Ukraine. During the years 1928-1930, between 1 1/2 to 2 million Ukrainians were deported or incarcerated in concentration camps, and another 300,000-500,000 were destroyed in situ, usually during the process of “dekulakization”.

……………………….

6 L’est Europeen, April-May, p 26.
7 Proletars’ka Pravda (Proletarian Truth) , January 30, 1930.
8 O.K. Kasymenko, Istoriya ukrains’koi R.S.R (History of the Ukrainian S.S.R). Kiev, 1960, p 279
9 Boris Martechenko and Olexa Woropay, La famine-genocide en Ukraine, 1932- 1933. Paris, 1938, p. 22.