The continued trials and arrests can be explained in only two ways. Either the Ukrainian national movement had gained prodigiously during the years of Soviet rule and had swung to itself not only the remains of those people who had fought for the Ukrainian National Republic but also the founders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic itself. If so, it would have required little help from outside to have won the independence of the country. Or the government of Stalin had decided to eliminate as counter-revolutionary all men of any capacity for independent thinking and the accusations against them were devoid of factual foundation. One after another such Communists as Postyshev, who had carried on the first trials, were themselves accused of Ukrainian nationalism and liquidated or deported. While this was going on in intellectual circles, Stalin announced his plans for the socialization of agriculture. It was ordered that this be carried through with the greatest speed and the peasants were forced to give up their lands and to enter the newly established collective farms, which were established throughout Ukraine as well as throughout the entire Soviet Union. Here the government encountered and proceeded to deal with the other aspect of Ukrainian life that had embarrassed the Ukrainian National Government. That had attempted to satisfy the peasant hunger for land by taking it away from the great landlords and giving it to the peasants. It was the opposition of these Russianized classes that had been used by the Germans in supporting the hetmanate of Skoropadsky against the Republic, and by the Russians with Denikin, when it came their turn. Now by a clever extension of the use of the term “kulak,” all the peasants who had been prospering on their own land and on that which they had acquired, were declared enemies of the Soviet Union and were driven into the collective farms. Armed detachments commandeered all the grain of the individual landowners. These retaliated by killing their cattle when they were ordered to turn them over to the collective farms, and the situation became steadily more serious.