in the campaign “NKVD National Operations and Institutional Russification (1937–1939)”
On 24 January 1938 the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), by its resolution "On the Liquidation of National Schools and National Sections in Schools," closed non-Russian schools throughout the Union, liquidating the national districts and village soviets on the same day[1][2]; on 13 March the resolution of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) and the USSR Council of People's Commissars No. 324 "On the Compulsory Study of the Russian Language in the Schools of the National Republics and Regions" made the metropole's language a compulsory subject in all schools of the republics[3]. Kyiv executed the decision on 10 April 1938: the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, "proceeding from the decision of the Central Committee of the VKP(b)," declared "the further existence of special national schools inexpedient and harmful" and resolved to reorganize the German, Polish, Czech, Swedish and other schools and technical colleges "into Soviet schools of the ordinary type," to liquidate national sections and classes at ordinary schools, colleges and universities, and, where there was nowhere to transfer the pupils, to transfer the institutions themselves to ordinary school curricula - "with instruction in Ukrainian or Russian"; the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute was turned into an institute of foreign languages, and all the work was ordered finished by 1 August 1938[4]. The Politburo wrote its justification into the resolution itself: "enemies of the people - Trotskyites, Bukharinites and bourgeois nationalists operating in the People's Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian SSR - implanted special national German, Polish, Czech, Swedish, Greek and other schools, turning them into hotbeds of bourgeois-nationalist, anti-Soviet influence on children"[4]. The decision was given the form of a state act by the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR in its resolution of 29 June 1938 on the reorganization of special national schools, colleges and the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute: by 1 August 1938, 766 national primary, incomplete secondary and secondary schools were subject to reorganization into ordinary schools with (predominantly) Russian and Ukrainian as the language of instruction, and another 122 were merged with Russian and Ukrainian ones on the territorial principle - the count of the historian Liudmyla Yakubova[5].