Under such conditions support was withdrawn very ostentatiously from all those movements which aimed to create brotherhood on the basis of Ukrainian tradition with the population of Eastern Galicia and Western Ukraine. Step by step the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences dropped direct connections even with those foreign scholars whom it had elected to membership. Later still its organization was changed, and instead of being an institution founded by and responsible to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, it became merely a branch of the All-Union Academy of Sciences and represented those activities which were carried on within the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Most of its special and localized activities were abolished and it became merely one part of a great organization spreading throughout the entire country and devoted to the study of the general interests of the whole. All these tendencies were written into law by the All-Union constitution of 1936, which definitely conferred upon the central authority all possible control over the various Soviet Republics. This marked the end of the illusory independence that had characterized the position of Ukraine since the organization of the Soviet Union. The power of the Kremlin was not in fact increased, but it rendered possible the use of this power through the official agencies of the government and not through the machinery of the Communist Party, which was in effect a duplication of the channels of command. The change was really one of name only, for the power of Stalin was as absolute before as after, the same men filled the leading positions in the central government and in the Party, and the constitution merely affirmed publicly what every one knew privately to be true. The following years witnessed the continued development of industry and the renewal of attempts to bind Ukrainian manufacturing and mining even more closely into the whole of the Soviet Union. There was a continuation of the purges of every one who might be remotely charged with holding a distinctively Ukrainian opinion on the ground that he was cooperating with the Ukrainian nationalist agitation, but the purges now came to include not only the possible suspects but almost all of the men who had been zealous both in Ukraine and the Russian Soviet Republic in organizing the regime. The old Bolsheviks were nearly all liquidated and year by year fewer of the more convinced young Communists of Ukraine found their way to the higher places in the Soviet Union. Those positions were more and more confined to Russians and even very few of the Ukrainians who had gone to other parts of the country for their careers were rewarded.