 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 Austro-Hungarian Galicia, 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.