ended up in Katerynoslav, and later in Taganrog, where it ceased to exist. On March 17-19, 1918, the II All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets was held in Katerynoslav, which proclaimed the independence of Soviet Ukraine. On April 18, 1918, Skrypnyk was elected a member of the All-Ukrainian Bureau to lead the insurgent struggle against the German occupiers. At the so-called Taganrog meeting (April 19-20, 1918), Skrypnyk was elected secretary of the Organizational Bureau for the 1st Congress of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U at its first congress held in Moscow (July 5-12, 1918), where he was the main speaker. But after the congress, he was removed from the leadership of the CP(b)U and left in Moscow. Skrypnyk was a leader in the so-called Kyiv faction of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, the independentists, sensitive to the issue of nationality, and promoting a separate Ukrainian Bolshevik party, while members of the predominantly Russian Katerynoslav faction preferred joining the All-Russian Communist Party in Moscow, according to Lenin's internationalist doctrine. The Kyiv faction won a compromise at a conference in Taganrog, Soviet Russia in April 1918, when the Bolshevik government was dissolved and the delegates voted to form an independent Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, CP(b)U. But in July a Moscow congress of Ukrainian Bolsheviks rescinded the resolution and the Ukrainian party was declared a part of the Russian Communist Party. Skrypnyk worked for the Cheka secret police during the winter of 1918–19, then was the head of the special department of the Cheka of the South-Eastern and Caucasian Fronts. He returned to Ukraine, where he was a special commissioner of the Defense Council for combating the insurgent movement and led the suppression of the rebellion of Danylo Terpylo. He later served as People's Commissar of Worker-Peasant Inspection (1920–21) and Internal Affairs (1921–22). During debates leading up to the formation of the Soviet Union in late 1922, Skrypnyk was a proponent of independent national republics and denounced the proposal of the new General Secretary, Joseph Stalin, to absorb them into a single Russian SFSR state as thinly-disguised Russian chauvinism. Lenin temporarily swayed the decision in favour of the republics, but after his death, the Soviet Union's constitution was finalized in January 1924 with very little political autonomy for the republics. Having lost this battle, Skrypnyk and other autonomists would turn their attention towards culture. Skrypnyk was Commissar of Justice between 1922 and 1927 and the