It had taken almost a year to bring the council to this decision. As in the case of the United States, the vast majority of the people did not realize in the beginning the issues involved. For a century many of the best and most patriotic minds of Ukraine had dreamed of a great federation of the Slavs or of a reorganized Russia which would give equal rights and liberties to all classes of the population. They had sought this from each of the governments since the Revolution and had failed to obtain it from any. Federation had never appealed to any party in the Russian Revolution. The conservative Cadets, men like Milyukov and his friends, Socialists like Kerensky, Bolsheviks like Lenin and Stalin, all in their own way demanded that there should be a centralized state. Just as the Russian intelligentsia in the field of thought throughout the nineteenth century refused to admit the possibility of a cultural development in Ukraine apart from Russia, just as Peter the Great and Catherine could not admit that they had to deal with a situation different from that prevailing in Moscow and St. Petersburg, so the revolutionary leaders held fast to the same idea. The Council had wasted months in futile discussion and negotiations at a time when they could have been profitably employed in building up local institutions and restoring order. Now when it became clear that war and organized war was to be the order of the day, they finally acted and Ukraine appeared again as an independent state with its capital at Kiev. CHAPTER TWENTY _FOREIGN RELATIONS_ This struggle to win for Ukraine a position first as a federated state in a new Russia and secondly as a completely independent country was not proceeding in an atmosphere of peace and quiet. The First World War was still going on with the forces of the Triple Entente and the Central Powers locked in a terrific struggle. England and France had welcomed the Russian Revolution, because they believed that Russia after the fall of the Tsar would carry on the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary more successfully. It took them only a few weeks to realize that the collapse of Russia had imposed on them a still heavier burden. They could not understand that the Russian Revolution had been a collapse because of excessive strain and war weariness and it is quite a question how far the Russian leaders realized this themselves. At all events Lenin and Trotsky called for immediate peace and this, as much as their program of social reforms, won them a sympathetic hearing in many quarters. It brought them into conflict with the representatives of England, France and the United States, which were working to keep Russia in the war against the Central Powers.