SOVIET UKRAINE

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26186, 9 August 1950, Page 7

SOVIET UKRAINE

“NATIONALIST GANGS STILL ACTIVE” “ PRAVDA ” PRINTS LETTER TO MR STALIN (Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, August 8. “In a rather roundabout way the Moscow newspaper ‘Pravda’ has revealed that nationalist gangs are still active in the Soviet Ukraine,” says a correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian.” He warns, however, that too much should not be read into this news. “Pravda” has published a mlessage of greetings to Mr Stalin from the women of the Transcarpathian and Izmail provinces of Southern Ukraine. Tne letter recorded the women s gratitude for their emancipation and other benefits bestowed upon them by Soviet rule. Referring to the collectivisation campaign now in progress in these provinces, the letter said: “We have entered with firmness and determination upon the road of collective farms. The kulaks and Ukrainian Nationalists. savage enemies of the Ukrainian people, have been doing all they can to hinder collectivisation, but they have failed. Filled with burning hatred towards the people and collectivisation, the sorry remnants of the kulaks and the Ukrainian Nationalists are trying even now to wreck collective farms. “We promise you, dear Josef Vissarionovich, together with our husbands, sons, and daughters, to summon up all our strength and all we have for the fight against the evil enemies of the collective farm system, against the remnants of the kulaks and of the Ukrainian Nationalist gangs.” “This news,” says the correspondent, “certainly does not mean that there is widespread dissatisfaction with the Soviet regime among the mass of the Ukrainian peasantry. The provinces concerned’ were before the war part of Czechoslovakia and Rumania, and what is true of them does not apply to the Ukrainian areas which have been in the Soviet Union since the Revolution. “The report does show, however, that the whole might of the Soviet propaganda and police machine has been unable to stamp out during the last five years a political movement whose ideas are the very opposite of Soviet Communism.”