Poetaș was killed during these fights. But aside from this insurrection, which had been long in preparation, and supported by gangs moving in from the Ukraine, there was no other movement against the union, which represented the will of an uncontested majority." Brătianu sees a direct link between the Khotyn events and the 1924 rebellion at Tatarbunar, "also involving a foreign population." The non-communist orientation of at least part of the Uprising was attested as early as 1919 by another Romanian scholar, Nicolae Iorga. His diaries initially referred to the rebels as "Bolsheviks", before noting that they were "in fact [UNR] soldiers". However, in 1995, Stănescu referred to the Khotyn affair as "orchestrated by the Bolshevik government", and suggests that all rebel "commissions and committees" had "direct links with the Bolshevik army". Potylchak views Romanian historiography in both the royal period and the national communism of the 1980s as having "reduce[d] the uprising to solely a 'Bolshevik revolt', and minimize[d] the anti-Ukrainian actions" undertaken in its wake. In his reading, the quashing of the uprising signified a "colonial expansion", to which the UNR could only oppose "neutrality", despite being fundamentally sympathetic to the rebels. Potylchak also proposes a critical view of post-Soviet Ukrainian readings of Khotyn, in that it fails to account for the popular and spontaneous nature of the struggle and instead overemphasizes Mayevski's alleged contribution. Another Ukrainian scholar, V. Kroytor, is openly critical of the UNR's "excessively cautious and inconsistent" behavior in respect to Romanian maneuvers. Soviet historiography and Moldovenist authors focused on claims that the revolt was indicative of a brewing class conflict, with Romanian authorities depicted as irredeemably reactionary; as noted by Suveică, Soviet monographs on the revolt achieved this goal by relying on autobiographical writings contributed by the rebels, and by citing Soviet propaganda from ca. 1920 as a primary source. Such reviews also highlighted the connections between Khotyn and Tatarbunar, but ascribed them a different meaning, as samples of "heroic struggle" by the "Bessarabian workers." As noted by van Meurs, the proletarian component was spuriously highlighted, and the revolt described as related to the Red Army's clashes with the UNR and the Allied intervention forces. A 1976 monograph advanced the claim that Bolsheviks prepared the revolt to coincide with the Red Army's advance into Podolia, but that they could not control its timing. These narratives also contradicted themselves in claiming that UNR agents had