Word: tsars
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Major difficulty with census-taking in Russia is that the peasants are census-shy. In the days of the Tsar they fled from or fought with census officials, fearing that their women were about to be carried off or that all the aged and feeble were going to be boiled in soap. Today their fears are less fantastic, more shrewd: they consider counting noses just another way of picking victims for purges, taxation, the army...
...history of the Ukraine (meaning borderland) dates back to the 16th Century when thousands of "Little Russian" or Ukrainian fugitives fled from Poland to the banks of the Dnepr and there established the State of Dnepr Cossacks. Exasperated by successive Polish invasions, they finally appealed to Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich at Moscow for protection and placed themselves under his sovereignty. The Cossack nobility fused with the Russian nobility, the Ukrainian peasantry soon became an assimilated part of the Russian peasantry and for nearly 300 years there was little difference between the Little Russians of the Ukraine and the Great Russians...
...Ukrainian separatist movement of the 19th Century was little more than a dream fostered by a few Galician intellectuals. During the World War it became a German-imported article which reached its greatest success when the Tsar was overthrown, the Russian armies collapsed and German Warlords Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff decided that the Ukraine would be a good bread basket for Germany's starving armies. At the fortress of Brest-Litovsk (now in Poland) on March 3, 1918, a Russian delegation signed a humiliating treaty which detached from All the Russias not only Finland and the White...
...sugar beets, flax, cotton. Fully 96% of the land is now collectivized. From the Ukraine come some of the Soviet's best-known figures: Alexei Stakhanov, author of the speed-up system, Maria Demchenko, champion sugar-beet raiser, Valentin Kataev, Soviet author. The Ukrainian language, outlawed by the Tsar, is not only now allowed but fostered...
...find easy conquests in Poland and Rumania, but undoubtedly it will have tough going in Russia. Not only has Dictator Stalin a better army than Poland or Rumania, but long ago he took pains to silence if not kill all Ukrainians inclined to demand "extra rights." As one of "Tsar" Vladimir's entourage last week pungently expressed it: "This is all very well, but what will Mr. Stalin...