Apparently the change of policy was connected with the plans of Hitler to come to terms with Stalin for the division of Eastern Europe, and the weakening of anti-Communist Ukrainian movements was part of the larger design. Yet it had a very important result. It completely destroyed the unnatural alliance between the democratic Ukrainians and the Nazi Germans. It ended any lingering dreams that there might be a real friendship between the Germans and the Ukrainians. The result was that during the next months and years there were no further attempts to secure German support. When in the fall of 1939 Germany attacked Poland, there did not come any revolt in Eastern Galicia against the Poles, despite the increasingly severe measures taken by the Polish government, and when Germany finally attacked the Soviet Union, she secured more aid from the dissatisfied Russians than she did from the Ukrainians whom she had so flagrantly abandoned. The development of Carpatho-Ukraine was then only another one of the unsuccessful Ukrainian attempts to win liberty for at least one part of the divided country, but it showed the growing feeling of unity that existed amid the overwhelming tragedies of the past years. It played a disproportionate role in the fateful year of 1939 and it emphasized anew the important strategic position of Carpatho-Ukraine and indeed of Ukraine as a whole in the coming struggles. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE. _THE UKRAINIAN SOVIET REPUBLIC_ The seizure of power in Russia by the Bolsheviks gave them the opportunity to carry out their theories of government, which were in marked variance to all previous political thought. Hitherto, everywhere in the world there had been attempts to set up national or dynastic governments located in definite areas of the earth’s surface. The Soviets now cast all this into the wastebasket and in their zeal for an international and worldwide revolution, they planned to build a government based upon the worldwide community of interests of the workers and peasants. In theory at least this was to be an international government and they had high hopes that the laboring classes of the world would rally to their standard. It happened that Lenin, Trotsky, and also the vast majority of the other leaders were Russian and that the seat of the government was in Moscow, but in theory they cared very little about Russia as such. In the first heat of their enthusiasm, they even went so far as to recognize the equality of all the nationalities in the old Russian Empire and allow them full self-determination and even the right of secession. The old organization was completely wiped out and a new structure, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, was established.