Material on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in the US generally known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact, reminded me of museum displays in Lithuania, Belarus, and Moldova, and how while in the US WW II begins September 1, 1939, in Belarus and Russia The Great Patriotic War starts in 1941.
This museum had quite a large number of portraits of men with just the briefest of details about them. On the one hand this really humanized the otherwise amorphous mass of men which was the military, but on the other with no narrative there was very little communicated about the course of the war.
About a third of the room was closed off, and a look at the ceiling made it clear why.
The Museum has separate admission charges for the exhibits on Old Odessa and Odessa in WW II (the display I saw). There is no charge for entrance to the room on the Holodomor. I am especially interested in this because my grandfather had been in Ukraine doing relief work only ten years before. Photographs of a smiling Joseph Stalin accompany photographs of starving Ukrainians and emaciated corpses.
