certain degree of cultural autonomy, there were 8 national districts in Ukraine as well as a number in Russia and one each in Georgia and Azerbaijan and Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Volga German ASSR), schools and newspapers, in compliance with the policy of national delimitation in the Soviet Union. In September 1929, discontented with the reintroduction of coercive grain requisitions and collectivization of agriculture, several thousand Soviet peasants of German descent (mostly Mennonites) convened in Moscow, demanding exit visas to emigrate to Canada, provoking a significant political scandal in Germany, which soured Soviet-German relations. The charity "Brothers in Need" was established in Germany to raise money for the Soviet Germans, President Paul von Hindenburg himself donated of his own money for that purpose. The Soviet government first permitted 5,461 Germans to emigrate, but then deported the remaining 9,730 back to their original places of residence. However, throughout 1930, efforts were still being made by the Soviet government to increase the number and quality of German national institutions in the Soviet Union. The first mass arrests and show trials specifically targeting Soviet Germans (those who were considered counter-revolutionaries) occurred in the Soviet Union during the 1933 Ukrainian terror. However, with the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (b)'s decree of November 5, 1934, the domestic anti-German campaign assumed all-union dimensions. In 1933–1934, a campaign was launched in Germany to help Soviet Volksdeutsche during the famine by sending food packets and money. Deeply concerned over cross-border ethnic ties of national minorities (such as Germans, Poles, Finns), in 1934 the Soviet Union decided to create a new border security zone along its western border, and in 1935–1937 potentially disloyal nationalities (including German) were mostly (albeit not completely) deported from this strip of land to the inner parts of the Soviet Union by NKVD. German national institutions were gradually abolished. In 1937–1938 NKVD conducted mass operations "for the destruction of espionage and sabotage contingents" (known as National operations of NKVD) among diaspora nationalities against both Soviet and foreign citizens (resulting in arrest and usually execution), including an NKVD campaign against Germans, in fact indiscriminately targeting national minorities during the Great Terror. Concurrently all German and other diaspora national districts and schools in the Soviet Union except the Volga German ASSR and German schools within that republic were abolished. The Soviet government had made a prior decision to evacuate the entire population