The prohibition of the publication of books in the Ukrainian language for forty years now bore very definite fruits. The Ukrainian leaders were not in a position to distribute revolutionary material in their native language as well as were the Poles, the Baltic peoples and the groups of the Caucasus. The peasants (and they were the chief force in the disturbances in the country) were concerned about the land question and undoubtedly paid more attention to the economic situation than the national and cultural problems. On the other hand, in the various cities of Ukraine where there had been an influx of Great Russians, largely workmen, the appeals of the radical parties that also denied the existence of Ukraine, led the strikers in the various factories to emphasize the demands that they made on the owners and on the government. Here again it was highly expedient to play down the feelings of any self-conscious Ukrainian groups and to label them as dreamers and as fantastic individuals who were romantically trying to recall a long vanished past. It is significant in view of the frequent statements that only a handful of scholars and literary men were in favor of Ukrainian separate development that the new laws introduced by the government repealed all the prohibitions that had been made in 1863 and 1876. The censorship was lifted and without delay there began a flood of Ukrainian newspapers and journals in all the cities of Ukraine. Several were started in Kiev, in Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Poltava. In places where for over a century there had not been a word of Ukrainian spoken (according to the information of the government), now newspapers sprang up almost like magic to supply a need that was solemnly declared to be non-existent. More than that, the Imperial Academy of Sciences re-studied the question of Little Russian and officially decided that Ukrainian formed an independent East Slavonic language and was not a mere dialect of Great Russian. This fact alone was a complete reversal of the position taken for a century by scholars, journalists, radicals and critics. It justified the position of the Ukrainian national party in Galicia and it also warmly supported the attitude of the Great Russian scholars who had so persistently and inconsistently emphasized the differences between the Muscovites and the people of Kiev in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It could not of course restore to the Ukrainian cause those millions of people who during the past centuries had become Russianized in order to acquire the civilized and highly cultured society which they had lost hope of finding at home.