Actually, my post about the passion for prohibitions only partially concerned the topic of lies in official history. However, too many critics of my words began to assert that I "glorify" the Nazis and Romanian fascists and turn a blind eye to their atrocities. In fact, I did not write anything like this, but if people do not want to read carefully, then there is something to clarify.

First of all: an absolute lie, that only Nazis and Romanian fascists were killing Odessa Jews. For example, my great-grandfather and two of his brothers died somewhere in the streets of Odessa (precisely unknown) during the famine, after the capture of the city by the Bolsheviks. It was absolutely artificial, man-made famine: there was bread in the village, but no one wanted to give it away. My great-grandmother, along with my grandmother fled from Odessa and worked in the village in a service - so they survived then. And men who tried to find work and bread in Odessa - died of hunger. And, according to the stories of my grandmother, the dead uncleared bodies were lying on the Odessa streets.

It is characteristic that even then the selection of Bolsheviks. In Odessa there was a branch of the American organization for starving. But it was led by the people of the Bolsheviks, so only those who were associated with the authorities. The rest was allowed to die quietly.

When I was listening to this grandmother's story, and she told me only in the 90s, I recalled the famous letters of Korolenko, who demanded from the authorities that the commissions for helping the starving be independent so that they were not headed by the people of the Bolsheviks. And it was not an academic dispute. For this, in fact, he was ruined.

My second grandfather fled from the dekulakization - my great-grandfather had a small mill that cost his master's life. And my grandfather's brother was shot in 1937. They say that as a Zionist. Of course, he was not - what Zionists in the late thirties in the USSR? And my grandfather in the 32nd or 33rd year "voluntarily" spent a year building the White Sea-Baltic Canal. This was such a "tax burden" on private traders - one of the private traders had to "go on vacation" for a year at the construction site. Grandfather never told about this year. I do not think that many private traders managed to return home from this construction site.

My grandmother's sister's family fled to Romania after the arrival of the "reds" to Odessa. On the border, exactly as with Ostap Bender, they all took away. But in the rest, further in Romania they had a normal life. A year and a half later, my grandmother's sister's husband, who was well versed in the forest, created his own business - a sawmill and a timber warehouse. Until 1937 life in Romania was excellent: the children studied in Jewish gymnasiums, where, by the way, they studied Hebrew, banned in the USSR. Then the Romanian fascists came to power, and the situation became different. And in the 39th they were joined by Soviet troops. The family of my grandmother's sister was very lucky: their business was in the same city, and they lived in another. The father of the family left the business without even thinking, and went to work as an accountant. And the Soviet troops conducted a census of all private traders. Then, on the eve of the war - in the spring of 1941, as in the Baltic countries, undoubtedly, preparing to attack Germany, the Bolsheviks sent all private traders and their families to Siberia.

It can be said that the Jews who fell under these repressions were "lucky": the number of those who survived after Siberia is still slightly larger than the number of those who stayed and ended up in the German and Romanian ghettos. Only now I'm not ready to kiss the Communists for this leg. They survived against the will of the Communists, and not because of it.

But I do not have relatives who lived in small Jewish towns, and I know almost nothing about the Jewish towns that fell into the zone of the Holodomor. I was told that these places were dying out even earlier than the surrounding villages:

the villages lived at the expense of servicing villages: tailors, shoemakers, and t. Before the big famine came to the village, he came to the township.

In general, if we compare the atrocities of the Nazis and Romanian fascists in Odessa and the Odessa region with the "activity" of the official communist government, then I think that by the number of ruined Jews the Bolsheviks will not lose much to the Nazis.

But this is just one side of the coin. There is a second. About her another time.