About fear

Here journalists persistently ask me about fear.

My grandmother’s brother, Yegor Yakovlevich Romanov, was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918 simply because he was returning from World War I in a tsarist uniform. All that remains of him in the family archive is a photograph from around 1916 - a very young boy with a kind, naive face, wearing a cap with the name of the ship (training ship "Peter the Great").

My great-grandfather Philip, born in 1870, a man of deep faith and righteousness, was dispossessed by the Bolsheviks in 1932 only because he had a two-story house in the village. Bereznik, Nytvensky district, Perm province; because he had a forge, a handicraft charcoal-burning industry, a tar mill, and horses; for the fact that he made good money by transporting a thresher to neighboring villages and grinding potatoes for starch in the mill he built. The house was quickly burned down by the new owners, and the family was forced to live homeless until they managed to buy a small shack in the city.

Great-grandfather, hearing the radio announcer say “our leader Stalin,” allowed himself to make fun of the announcer out loud in front of those around him: “Our leader, our leader ... is our louse!” Nobody turned him in, and his great-grandfather died of natural causes in 1953, having outlived the tyrant by six months.

My grandfather, who believed in communist fairy tales in his youth, was the secretary of the district executive committee before the dispossession of his great-grandfather. Then, having been removed from all posts, the NKVD officer asked him: “Should I shoot you right away or torture you first?” My grandfather survived, but when he was rehabilitated and offered to rejoin the party, he invariably refused.

And why should we now be afraid of the dead who have risen from their graves - NKVD 2.0 and VKP(b) 2.0, with such and such a history?

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