The questions of the atrocities of the communist authorities in relation to their people have been attracting the attention of scientists, politicians, publicists, ethnographers, public figures all over the world for more than a dozen years. Thanks to their efforts, the world learned the names of hundreds and thousands of political prisoners who were arrested, repressed and forcibly deported without reason and without proof. Unfortunately, scientists paid less attention to the territory of the south of the Odessa region, known in the literature as Southern Bessarabia (Budzhak, the Ukrainian Danube region). The author has at her disposal valuable materials from the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine; regional, city and district archival institutions; city and district commissions on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, oral-historical testimony of eyewitnesses, which allows us to provide more reliable information about the events of the first year of the establishment of Soviet power in the region. Today, the author’s card index contains 2,218 surnames of the inhabitants of Southern Bessarabia (1,428 - heads of families, 790 - family members), who were repressed in the period from late June 1940 to early July 1941. Particularly brutal was the operation “to seize members of counterrevolutionary organizations and other anti-Soviet elements, as well as to evict family members of the repressed in the Moldavian SSR and the Chernivtsi and Izmail regions of the Ukrainian SSR”, which began at 2:30 on the night of June 12-13, 1941. In “Izmail region, 3,980 people were subject to confiscation, of which 358 people were arrested and 3,622 people were evicted.” Arrests and repressions in Izmail region were one of the ways to intimidate the local population, and the repressive and punitive apparatus was well trained in how to “blind the image of the enemy of the people”, using the traditional Bolshevik methods of denunciations, baseless accusations, bullying and tortures. In addition, the repressions that were carried out in the region were characterized by a national context - it was precisely belonging to a particular ethnic group that could be the cause of arrest or deportation.