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“In early Soviet times, when Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic, Moscow's policy of korenizatsiia - 'nativisation' - prompted a brief flourishing of a Ukrainian avant-garde, paywrights and poets and journalists attracted to this bustling city of industrial and trading fame, allowed to write in their own language at last. The policy was the Bolsheviks' attempt to endear this restive republic, and the others, to their rule. In this political environment, writers were elevated. This special treatment came, however, came with the heavy caveat of state control which was followed by repression - a story familiar across the Soviet Union. But in Kharkiv the axe fell quicker. Stalin grew tired of korenizatsiia and opted to wipe out the native intelligentsia instead. In the early 1930s, the party line shifted abruptly; Ukrainian 'bourgeois nationalism' was the new enemy. The purges began. The Soviet Union under Stalin's paranoid control regressed to Tsarist ways. Russification and centralisation, brutal orders issued by Moscow and carried out by its secret police.” — Jen Stout