Commissar of Education of the USSR from March 7, 1927 to February 28, 1933. He was a member of the executive committee of the Communist International from September 1, 1928 to July 7, 1933. Ukrainization Skrypnyk was appointed head of the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education in 1927. He convinced the Central Committee of the CP(b)U to introduce the policy of Ukrainization, encouraging Ukrainian culture and literature. He worked for this cause with almost obsessive zeal and, despite a lack of teachers and textbooks and in the face of bureaucratic resistance, achieved tremendous results during 1927–29. The Ukrainian language was institutionalized in the schools and society and literacy rates reached a very high level. As Soviet industrialization and collectivization drove the population from the countryside to urban centres, Ukrainian started to change from a peasants' tongue and the romantic obsession of a small intelligentsia into a primary language of a modernizing society. Skrypnyk convened an international Orthographic Conference in Kharkiv in 1927, hosting delegates from Soviet and western Ukraine (former territories of Austria-Hungary, then part of the Second Polish Republic). The conference settled on a compromise between Soviet and Galician orthographies, and published the first standardized Ukrainian alphabet accepted in all of Ukraine. The Ukrainian orthography of 1928, also known as Kharkiv orthography or Skrypnykivka, was officially adopted in 1928. Although he was a supporter of an autonomous Ukrainian republic and the driving force behind Ukrainization, Skrypnyk's motivation was what he saw as the best way to achieve communism in Ukraine, and he remained politically opposed to Ukrainian nationalism. He gave public testimony against "nationalist deviations" such as writer Mykola Khvylovy's literary independence movement, political anticentralism represented by former Borotbist Oleksandr Shumsky, and Mykhailo Volobuev's criticism of Soviet economic policies which made Ukraine dependent on Russia. From February to July 1933, Skrypnyk headed the Ukrainian State Planning Commission, became a member of the Politburo of the CP(b)U and served on the Executive Committee organizing the Communist International, as well as leading the CP(b)U's delegation to the Comintern. Great Purge In January 1933, Stalin sent Pavel Postyshev to Ukraine, with free rein to centralize the power of Moscow. Postyshev, with the help of thousands of officials brought from Russia, oversaw the violent reversal of Ukrainization, enforced collectivization of agriculture, and conducted a purge of the CP(b)U, anticipating the wider Soviet Great Purge which was to follow in 1937. Skrypnyk was removed as