Purged
In January 1933, Stalin sent Pavel Postyshev to Ukraine, with free rein to centralize the power of Moscow. Postyshev, with the help of thousands of officials brought from Russia, oversaw the violent reversal of Ukrainization, enforced collectivization of agriculture, including massive confiscation of grain contributing to the Great Famine or Holodomor, and conducted a purge of the CP(b)U, anticipating the wider Soviet Great Purge which was to follow in 1937.
Skrypnyk was removed as head of Education. In June, he and his "nefarious" policies were publicly discredited, and his followers condemned as "wrecking, counterrevolutionary nationalist elements". Rather than recant, on July 7 he shot himself at his desk at his apartment in Derzhprom at Dzerzhynsky Square (Dzerzhynsky Municipal Raion of Kharkiv city).
During the remainder of the 1930s, Skrypnyk's "forced Ukrainization" was reversed. Orthographic reforms were abolished and decrees were passed to bring the language steadily closer to Russian. The study of Russian was made obligatory and publishing of Ukrainian-language newspapers declined. Skrypnyk was posthumously rehabilitated only in 1990.
Read more about this topic: Mykola Skrypnyk
Famous quotes containing the word purged:
“For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
Show’d me the high, white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:
What dost thou in this living tomb?”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)