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from the industrial working class in the Ukraine and(for a time) from anarchical peasant bands stimulated bythe semi-legendary guerrilla leader Makhno. Petlyurawas driven ultimately to make terms with the Poles.Despite Allied efforts to hold them back, the Polescrushed by force of arms (1919) an independent governmentof western Ukraine, which had seized power ineastern Galicia and had proclaimed a federal union withPetlyurist Ukraine. A year later Polish fears of Bolshevismand designs on 'the western lands' led to theSoviet-Polish war, as already explained (p. 198).The outcome was that, as before 1914, the Ukrainianswere divided. Poland, taking the place of Austria,regained eastern Galicia, and in addition Volynia (seemap 5), while the Bolsheviks were left with the greatmajority of the Ukrainians and their half-ruined land,formed into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.Groups of Ukrainian nationalists took refuge in westernEurope and did their best to keep alive the cause of afree Ukraine, in which task they received considerableassistance from the numerous Ukrainian immigrants inNorth America.The success of the Bolsheviks had been due to theirown energy and ruthlessness, but especially to thedivisions among and mistakes of their opponents and thedivisions among the Ukrainians themselves. The appealof social revolution to the bulk of the Ukrainians, ue. thepeasants, proved to be much stronger than that ofnationalist slogans, especially since the Bolsheviks werequite prepared to give the widest latitude to the use ofUkrainian in schools, and in all other ways, and to staffwith Ukrainians the new administration which painfullytook shape on Soviet lines.The Ukrainian S.S.R. included substantially all thecontiguous areas in the Union compactly inhabited byUkrainians and something like three-quarters (23,000,000)of all the Ukrainians in the Union (1926). In theUkrainian S.S.R. itself they then formed nearly eightyper cent, of the population, and a still larger proportionof the peasantry which at that time was more than fourtimes as numerous as the townsmen.233

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