My interest and concern regarding the war in Ukraine come naturally. My mother was born in Ukraine, and her story of harrowing flight from her village with her mother and brother in the middle of a snowstorm in the dead of night, pursued by a squad of White Russians and Ukrainian irregulars, remains fresh in my mind.
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My father was born in the Russian oblast (administrative division) of Georgia near the border of South Ossetia, Stalin’s home region, and was the spitting image of the Russian tyrant — short, muscular, with a heavy mustache, a tendency to violence, and, like Stalin, played the piano. A racketeer who had the mayor of Montreal in his pay, he kept an enemies list and occasionally
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