Someone's Victory

Among the score of nations and states which make up the Soviet Union, the most unruly is the Ukraine. Over the years since the October Revolution, Moscow has set out again and again to Russianize Ukrainian culture and to collectivize the rich Ukrainian wheatlands, only to be met by passive, stubborn resistance from the peasants. Compromise on these occasions is usually signaled by a change of Russian administrators and a brief bow to Ukrainian culture. Recently the Kremlin began one of its periodic turnabouts.

The first hint was a press announcement that Gregory Ivanovich Petrovsky was to get a special award. Ukrainians recognized the name of an almost forgotten Ukrainian Bolshevik who disappeared in the 1938 purge after being charged with "bourgeois nationalism." A few weeks later, Soviet Playwright Alexander Korneichuk, wartime foreign minister of the Ukraine dismissed in 1944 on the same charge, was reinstated as Vice Premier. Last week the switch went the full 180 degrees: the Ukraine's Communist Party boss, Leonid Melnikov, a Moscow bureaucrat, was fired for "profound mistakes in the selection of personnel and the carrying out of national policy." Melnikov was charged with having mishandled the situation in the Western Ukraine by bringing Russian Communists into administrative positions, taking a wrong (i.e., strong) line on collectivization and ordering the Russian language to be taught in higher schools.

Some very humble people somewhere had won a victory against Communism.

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