At the same time, agriculture did revive as the collective farms became a little more efficient. Yet even there a new danger developed, for the plots of land which the individual households were allowed to cultivate for their own use tended to increase and to be better cared for. The peasants grasped at the slightest straw that would allow them to retain a vestige of their old independence. The government was obliged to act again to prevent these local family plots from taking up the best lands of the communal farms and to limit them at most to an acre or so. There were more decrees issued on this subject, there were more arrests and deportations and more attempts to destroy the Ukrainian character of the villages. The opposition could not be as strong as in the earlier periods when the peasants were better organized but events made it clear that the Soviet Union intended to leave no stone unturned to wipe out the slightest survival of any of the old traditional feelings. At the same time the rise of Nazism in Germany and the growing power of that country created a certain alarm in Moscow. Many of Hitler’s speeches called for the separation of Ukraine as the granary of Europe from the Soviet Union. The Communists could not fail to know that there were at least some of the Ukrainian nationalist leaders who were living in Berlin and presumably receiving some support from the German government. Yet it is noticeable that despite the many Nazi attacks upon the Communists, relations continued at least formally between the Nazis and the Communists through most of the thirties. It was obvious that Germany was trying to win Western support against the Soviet Union at the same time that the Communists were doing their best to stir up discontent throughout the world, whether directly or through the Communist International. This situation increased the Soviet desire to stifle anything that savored of Ukrainian nationalism and it added a certain reason for the Communist desire to incorporate fully the Ukraine in the national life of the Soviet Union. The idea of winning Ukrainian confidence by proper treatment did not occur to the authorities, for it was basically opposed to their fundamental belief that the Communist Party as developed in the Soviet Union was the only legitimate spokesman for the laboring masses of the world. It was this belief that had won them their position in the Soviet Union and it was to that belief that they were going to cling to the end of their stay in power.