The suspicion cannot be put down that these are people who have once been within the veil and are now willing to face even death rather than return. There can be but one reason, that life there was so hard and desperate that their present fate, such as it is and has been during the War, seems far better and more hopeful, even when hope is lacking, and when their future is dark and unsettled. We cannot help thinking that their stories and still more their actions throw into lurid relief and confirm the tales of the deportations, the famines, the concentration camps in the wastes of Siberia and of Central Asia, that have drifted across the sealed borders of the Soviet Union and which have never been accepted at face value. Behind the veil that the Soviet Union has cast around it, Ukraine has been united. Ravaged by war, plundered and destroyed by the marching and countermarching of two armies, drained of its population by death and by deportations, it remains a tragic spot in the wreckage of a great war. Impartial observers have told us of the devastation and the suffering in other lands, but Ukraine remains in the shadows. Her spokesmen at home are mute and there are only the official representatives of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic speaking, as is their wont, the words of the Soviet Union to assure us that all is well. The world would like to believe it, it is resting its hopes of a better future upon it and yet the doubts are not dispelled, when it would be so easy, if the Soviet Union wished to do it. But not only that. With the triumph of the Soviet “democracy” in Ukraine, the Soviet Union is hastening to assure the world that it has discovered new examples of the revival of Ukrainian nationalism. It has found new cases on a large scale of the evil influences of the work of Professor Hrushevsky. It has found reasons for new purges of the Ukrainian Communist leaders who are unworthy of their great task of promoting the new “democracy.” There are new rumors of a drought in Ukraine. The world has heard all this several times and realizes now that it is the story of the last twenty-five years since the fall of an independent Ukraine. To-day Ukraine is one. For the first time in centuries it has been united under one government. Not since the days of ancient Kiev has this been so fully true, but it is a far cry from the Ukrainian Soviet Republic to that free and independent government which was formed so hopefully in 1918, in the heat and confusion of the First World War. It is a far cry from the dream of a free and independent republic organized on the democratic principles of the West to the present Soviet Republic, from the wild and tumultuous Kozak Host with its elected officers to the present organization with the chiefs appointed by Moscow. It is a sad story and the present chapter is by no means the most hopeful. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN _THE FUTURE OF UKRAINE_