Yet while the central authority was being extended over the country, the Soviets gave a wide scope to cultural Ukrainization. The New Economic Policy was very popular in the land, since it gave a certain liberty to the individual peasants and there were many people who believed that the worst extremes of Militant Communism were over. There was great attention paid to the founding of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the Ukrainian Soviet government sent out the most cordial invitations to the old leaders of the Ukrainian Republic to return and take their places in the new order and in the rebuilding of the country. Many accepted. Professor Hrushevsky returned from Vienna and was made head of the Historical Section of the Academy of Sciences. Holubovich, who had been President of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian National Republic, followed and many of the other leaders moved to Kharkiv and Kiev. The Academy of Sciences flourished and intellectual work was liberally supported. It elected to membership the outstanding scholars of Western Ukraine, who welcomed this opportunity to have free and open communication with their friends and kindred of Great Ukraine. At the same time, steps were taken to introduce Ukrainian into all the offices of the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. A Ukrainian army was established, with the official language Ukrainian, and while it formed part of the Red Army of the Soviet Union, it was national enough to win much sympathy and support from all classes of the population. It was only the hardened and incorrigible opponents of Communism who refused to be appeased by these actions and who persisted in refusing to credit the new regime with good intentions. It is true that there remained on the statute books the old Communist regulations in regard to the Academy of Sciences but there were relatively few attempts to enforce them, and while there was some hampering of the work of the scholars by zealous advocates of Marxism, it hardly seemed important for the average person. The same was true in almost all walks of life. Ukraine began to recover from the devastations of the civil wars. Yet during these years, Communism made very little advance among the Ukrainian people, and by 1925 the non-Ukrainian members of the party far outnumbered the Ukrainian, as they had from the beginning. This was very satisfactory to all those who were eager for the well-being of the Ukrainians, but it was not good news to the representatives of the ruling group in the Kremlin, who were hoping for the spread of their doctrines throughout the country. For a while there was little that they felt able to do and even when Kaganovich appeared in Ukraine, he had only kind words for the progress that Ukrainian culture was making throughout the land.