This “high” cultural activism was accompanied by what was referred to as “low” Ukrainization, meaning the promotion of the Ukrainian language in ordinary life—in the media, in public debate, and above all in schools. Just before the start of the school year in 1923, the republican government decreed that all Ukrainian schoolchildren should be taught in their own language, using a new educational programme designed to “cultivate a new generation of loyal citizens.”88 The idea was to make the peasantry both literate and Soviet. By absorbing Marxist thought in Ukrainian, they would come to feel
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