As a result they decided to renew their efforts to wipe out the last vestiges of Ukrainian separatism and to end the Ukrainian language. Count Valuyev, the Minister of the Interior, declared that there never was, is not and never will be a separate Little Russian language but that it was only a peasant dialect of Great Russian. To that end he gave an order that henceforth there should be allowed to be printed in Ukrainian only those books which fell in the field of belles-lettres. Publication of all books in the Little Russian language which had religious content, textbooks and in general books intended for elementary reading should be forbidden. Valuyev pretended that Great Russian was intelligible to every literate person and that there was no reason why the illiterate masses should not begin their education in it. He also pretended to think that the writings of the early Ukrainian authors were on the same par as peasant dialect stories in any language and so he ostensibly left a loophole, but since these books could be put in simple form for the masses, the censors interpreted his ideas to hold that works in belles-lettres might be used as elementary readers and therefore they could not be published. As a result there were some years in which no work in Ukrainian appeared at all. It would be interesting to know if this outburst of fear of separatism was in any degree aided by the American Civil War, then at its height. It was at this time that the Imperial Russian Government sent a fleet to New York, perhaps to serve as a counterweight to any possible interference by Western European powers on behalf of the South, and such authors as Dostoyevsky were making allusions to the bloody struggle that was going on in the New World. The establishment of the United States had had a great effect on Russian educated thought a half century earlier and perhaps some of the Russian officials now were apprehensive of trouble. At all events the sixties defined precisely the attitude that the Russian government was to take toward Ukrainian cultural aspirations for the rest of the nineteenth century, until the Revolution of 1905. The various Ukrainian journals were suppressed. Some of the writers were sent to Siberia for several years. Others, such as Kulish, ultimately made their way to Galicia and lived in virtual exile, while their books, published there in Lviv, were smuggled into Russia to keep alive the spark of Ukrainian freedom.