But even at its height, korenizatsiya never meant intellectual freedom. Kravchenko recalled a friend pointing at some public toilets, signed ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ in Ukrainian, and hissing, ‘There’s the whole of our national autonomy!’ The former Rada president, Hrushevsky, was lured back to the Soviet Union in 1924 with the offer of a chair at the Kiev Academy of Sciences, only to find himself tailed day and night by the OGPU, the Bolshevik secret police.
