To counter-balance the influence of the leading scholars and writers of the last few years, Kaganovich and Postyshev, who had been appointed Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, began to discover that the leaders of Ukraine were in close touch with the nationalist and counter-revolutionary elements abroad, especially in Eastern Galicia. It was hardly a secret, for the Soviet authorities had encouraged such communication in the hope that discontent with Poland would bring the Western Ukrainians to declare their desire for union with their brothers to the east. The attempt had not been successful, and now the Soviet authorities were ready to turn this to account. They arrested many of the intellectual leaders, such as Yefremiv, the Vice President of the Academy of Sciences. Claiming that they belonged to a society for the liberation of Ukraine, they sentenced them to long terms in prison. Soon after they involved Professor Hrushevsky, deposed him from his place in the Academy of Sciences and deported him to a place near Moscow, where he was deprived of all possibilities of study. When his health was completely broken, he was allowed to go to a resthouse in the Caucasus to die. In 1931, the authorities discovered a new liberation centre. In connection with this they arrested Holubovich and many political leaders who had returned to Ukraine during the era of Ukrainization and after the usual trial condemned them to death. In 1933 it was discovered that more Ukrainian leaders were acting with the Ukrainian Military Organization abroad and these too were liquidated. Even Skrypnyk, who had been one of the most zealous partisans of Communism in Ukraine, was brought under suspicion and committed suicide. So did the writer Mykola Khvylovy, who was accused of counter-revolutionary work because he desired to strengthen the cultural connections between the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and Western Europe, something which was regarded as opposed to the growing unification of the Soviet Union and its increasing isolation from the rest of the world. Step by step the independence that had characterized the Ukrainian writers, even the Ukrainian Communists, during the twenties was taken away and those who survived accepted the necessity of producing a culture that was purely socialist and Kremlinesque in essence and Ukrainian only in language, and not always that, for the new tendencies aimed to assimilate into Ukrainian as many Russian words as possible.