"infiltrated the leadership of the revolt", accounting for its ultimate failure. Potylchak argues that such sources also distort the truth by arguing that Romanians intervened in order to assist the UNR. The earliest author to include Khotyn into the Soviet pantheon was Rakovsky, in 1925; his account was expanded upon by Naum Narcov in 1940. Narcov reported the mainstream view, according to which 50,000 peasants had fled into newly conquered Soviet territory during the Romanian backlash, but, as noted by van Meurs, his count was later "revised as 50,000 casualties." Soviet authors then claimed that an additional 30,000 were refugees, and changed the chronological setting to argue that at least some of the flights had taken place before the uprising; this allowed them to claim that any participation from across the Dniester was in fact also Bessarabian, rather than Ukrainian. Within this setting, a dispute ensued between the official historiographers of Soviet Moldavia and Soviet Ukraine, after the former included references to Khotyn into Moldavian history textbooks of the early 1950s. Unusually, these commented on the both Khotyn and Tatarbunar as "weak, isolated, ill-prepared, and mismanaged" uprisings. The standard view was wholly replaced in 1960s works, which depicted Khotyn as a "major revolt". In 1970–1978, a large-scale effort was made to collect and publish documents on the uprising from the various Soviet archives. Though present in both Romanian and Soviet interpretations, any claims of Soviet participation in the Khotyn revolt are reviewed with skepticism by van Meurs, who notes that the movement was local. He proposes that both the Hotin revolt, and the May 1919 skirmish in Tighina had support from across the Dniester, but that only the latter of the two was Soviet-sponsored. In 2017, Romanian military historian Alexandru Madgearu made a note that, despite being embraced by "several historians", any claim that the revolt was Bolshevik-instigated had been proven counterfactual. Kroytor suggests that the UNR's hesitation to assist pushed Khotyn rebels to join the 45th Rifle Division in June 1919—thus effectively contributing to the destruction of Ukrainian independence. Even under these circumstances, UNR spies, who remained active in Podolia as it fell to the Soviets, reported that the population of Hotin County remained anti-Russian, whereas "the majority of Bessarabia's population" was won over by communism. The latter claim is partly backed by records of both the Siguranța and the Whites, though these suggest that Bessarabians were generally pro-Russian,