Word: ukrainians
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Among the score of nations and states which make up the Soviet Union, the most unruly is the Ukraine. Over the years since the October Revolution, Moscow has set out again and again to Russianize Ukrainian culture and to collectivize the rich Ukrainian wheatlands, only to be met by passive, stubborn resistance from the peasants. Compromise on these occasions is usually signaled by a change of Russian administrators and a brief bow to Ukrainian culture. Recently the Kremlin began one of its periodic turnabouts...
When the nationalities resisted, they were slaughtered like cattle, but the results were often different from what the Kremlin intended. In 1941 millions of Ukrainians and a host of Chechens and Tartars deserted Soviet ranks and welcomed the German invaders. Retribution came in 1945, when Stalin sent Nikita Khrushchev, the Hammer of the Ukraine, to wipe out whole villages of dissident Ukrainian peasants (TIME, Jan. 12). Chechens and Tartars were "resettled" beyond the Urals...
Although Polish, Czechoslovakian, Serbo-Bulgarian, and Ukrainian are taught, in the department, the main emphasis in Slavic Languages and Literature is in Russian, lingual and literary...
Khrushchev joined the party in 1918, got his first taste of slaughter in the bloody Civil War that ravaged the Ukraine after the Communist Revolution. In the '20s, he assisted in the liquidation of the kulaks and the mass deportation of millions of Ukrainian peasants; in the second Five Year Plan (1933-38), he bossed the excavation of Moscow's subway stations. His reward was the Order of Lenin and one of the party's toughest assignments: to stamp out the lingering embers of Ukrainian nationalism...
Purges. The Ukrainians, 40 million strong and proud of their own mother tongue, have a local patriotism as fierce as any Scot's. "For many centuries," Khrushchev himself once proclaimed, "the Ukrainian people fought for the right to develop their own culture, build their own schools, publish their own literature . . ." Yet it was to root out just such "bourgeois nonconformity" that Khrushchev was sent to Kiev in 1938. Characteristically, he started with a purge, not only of the "enemies of the people" (i.e., Ukrainian patriots) but of "all Communists who have lost their vigilance." Three thousand local party secretaries...