During the course of 1919, the situation continued confused. The army of Admiral Kolchak, advancing into European Russia from Siberia, had been broken but General Denikin was attempting to cut his way north and west from the Donets basin. The Allies by this time had convinced themselves that the one way of defeating Bolshevism was to arm and equip the White Russian armies, which stood for the absolute unity of Russia and the denial of all the accomplishments of the Revolution. Everywhere that Denikin and his men went, they restored the old system, banned the Ukrainian language, closed Ukrainian newspapers and bookstores and reverted to the Russian policy of the years before the War. The foreign missions had now given up any idea of utilizing the peasant opposition to Bolshevism and the national movements against Russia. They had fully accepted the thesis of a monolithic Russia in Ukraine. Instead of trying to coordinate the popular movements for independence and strengthen them, they turned a deaf ear to all the petitions that were presented to them and made it fully evident that they were not interested in the attempts of Ukraine and various other sections of the old Empire to secure independence. During this period the Peace Conference was in session in Paris and to the annoyance of the delegates, there appeared there representatives of the Direktoria to plead for recognition as the government of Ukraine along with representatives of many other states. The Allied position was singularly unrealistic and even unclear not only to the petitioners but to the official delegates themselves. No one could decide what was to be the position taken toward Russia. The high hopes which had been placed upon the Russian Revolution and the Provisional Government had been dissipated. The delegates at Paris were well aware that this had failed and had fallen definitely before the Bolsheviks. They were well aware also that every section of the old Empire which was not inhabited by Great Russians was in a state of more or less open revolt. All around the borders of the country there had been set up governments running from Finland in the north to the Turkic tribes of Central Asia, which had been subjugated by Russian arms scarcely half a century before. All this rendered it a practical policy to accept the disintegration of Russia as they had that of Austria-Hungary and create a new federation or a series of independent and allied states.