In 1997, the famous Canadian historian compiled, from a photo album, the history of his aristocratic, landowning family in Tsarist Russia. His grandfather, Paul Ignatieff, was Minister of Education under the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and the Bolshevik Revolution forced them, with regret, to leave their homeland in 1917.
Michael Ignatieff returned to Russia in search of memories and visited his uncles in Canada to write these pages with ease. They are pleasant to read and hold the reader’s interest. Although they help the author reconstruct his own biography, they reveal the Bolshevik Revolution from the other side—that of the so-called White Russians, a lesser-known part of history.
Many perished fighting across the Russian steppes, and many others ended up in a difficult exile that settled in European capitals and in North America.