Thus the Soviet Union pressed on its policy of remodeling Ukrainian life to eliminate from it everything that had separated it from Great Russia in the past. Harder and harder measures were devised, the number of victims increased, and the new Ukrainian culture that developed under the Soviet Union contained less and less of those elements of freedom and democracy that had inspired Ukrainian thought during the preceding century. The Soviets not only aimed to conquer the present but they also attacked the past. They searched every means of changing the attitude of the people toward their heroes of the past They strove to emphasize every document that might reflect the revolutionary feelings of Shevchenko and Franko, they indulged in diatribes against Kulish and others as bourgeois, and they painted a picture of the past which in its opposition to the definite aspirations of the Ukrainian people came to sound very much like the decrees of the various rulers of Russia of the past. The only difference was that they paid at least lip service to the Ukrainian language in token of their theory that the culture of Ukraine as of the other republics was to be socialist in essence and only Ukrainian in language. It is difficult to draw up a balance sheet in detail and to weigh the gains of industrialization and the losses of the old life. It seems certain that there was no more real happiness in Ukraine during these years than during the long night of suppression that had preceded the Revolution. Every step was taken to break the national spirit and to train the new generation in an alien path. The only result was the building up of a sullen and defiant mood which might bode ill for the Communists, if it were properly exploited. CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX _UKRAINE IN WORLD WAR II._ By the middle of 1939 it became clear that divided Ukraine was in an unfortunate situation. For a brief moment the promise of a free and independent Carpatho-Ukraine seemed to indicate where the interest of the country lay. The growing autonomy of the province during the winter of 1938–9 had gathered to it many of those Ukrainians to whom national independence was the chief and only goal. Democratic as they were, they believed that they could use Carpatho-Ukraine as a base, even with German blessing. They had expected to profit by the German-Polish dispute to win Western Ukraine in case of trouble and they had visualized then a clash between Germany and the Soviet Union which would allow them to win the independence of Great Ukraine. Then a united Ukraine could be set up and this would be able to play an independent role in the world as a nation of over forty million people.