The Russian Album (29 page)

I had a thick bundle of roubles in my pocket. I handed them to the priest and asked him – through Lena – to find a mason in Pogribisce who would lay some stone on these naked graves. Father Sergei looked at me for a moment, considered the wad of red rouble notes in his hand, pondered the various possibilities, slipped the money into a pocket beneath his surplice and nodded. I went away believing nothing would happen.

I returned a year later, unannounced with a television crew, to make a documentary about Ukrainian independence in a series called
Blood and Belonging.
I was in the area, I said disingenuously, and wanted to drop in. The priest's wife leaned up on tiptoes and kissed me fiercely on both cheeks. The priest let me shake his hand, but continued to watch me with his small eyes. We drank vodka and everything, they said, was just the same, thank God, except that everyone was older and just as poor as ever. Eventually, I asked to go down to the crypt. The priest got the keys and led the way down the muddy track to the church. When the iron doors were swung back and the candles beneath the icons were lit, there beside the black basalt slab of my great-grandfather were two simple grey marble slabs on either side, covering the naked place where the women had lain for eighty years. I could not have wished it done better, and I said so. There and then, the priest and his wife, and the sexton and his wife, who had come along too, began singing the
pannihida,
and in the damp darkness, with the blue icon's lamp light glittering on the tombs of my family, they sang the words which end the Orthodox service for the dead – Eternal Memory, Eternal Memory Grant Him O Lord – and I felt, as tears finally came, that I had laid to rest at last not only my Russian ancestors but my father as well.

Michael Ignatieff

August 1997

INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Adams Brown, Isobel

Aegean Sea

Alberta, Canada

Alexander I

Alexander II

Alexander III

Alexandra Pavlovna, Tsarina of Russia

Amur, river

Andrassy, Count

anti-semitism

Atarbekov

Austria-Hungary

Baedeker's guide to Russia

Bakunin, Mikhail

Balkan atrocities

Baltic Sea

Barthes, Roland

Beauchamps

Belilovsky, Dr

Bessarabia

Bismarck, Count von

Black Sea

Bokhara

Bolsheviks

Bosnia

Bossibrod

Boxer Rebellion

Brest Litovsk, treaty of

British Columbia

Bucharest

Bulgaria

Canada

Cannes

Cap d'Antibes

Caspian Sea

Castellot, Monsieur

Catherine II

Charcot, J. M.

China

Citizen, The
(newspaper)

Conference of Berlin

Constantinople

Corps des Pages

Cossacks

Crimea

Crimean War

Dardanelles

Darier, Monsieur

Decembrists

Demian

Demidoff, Prince

Denikin, General

Disraeli, Benjamin

doctors

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

Doughino

Doukhobours

Dresden

Duma

Ekaterinadar

Elliot, Sir Henry

Engalicheff family

Essentuki

Eupatoria

Fourstatskaya street

Freud, S.

Galernaya street

Galitzine family

Gatchina

Gladstone, W. E.

Gorchakov, Prince

Goremikin, I. L.

Grafton,
HMS

Grant family

Grinevetsky

Gueh, Xenia

Hart House

Hastings

Hatfield House

Herzegovina

Herzen, Alexander

Hoover, Herbert

Huanchaco,
SS

Ignatieff, Alec

Ignatieff, Alexis (governor of Tver)

Ignatieff, Alison Grant

Ignatieff, General A. A. (‘Uncle Alyosha')

Ignatieff, Ekaterina (née Galitzine)

Ignatieff, Florence Hargreaves

Ignatieff, George

Ignatieff, Helen Fraser

Ignatieff, Katia

Ignatieff, Kolya

Ignatieff, Lionel

Ignatieff, Marjorie Adams

Ignatieff, Mika

Ignatieff, Mika (Farer)

Ignatieff, Natasha Mestchersky (1877–1944), birth; childhood; courtship and marriage; childbirth; marriage; attitude to revolution; and release of her husband; and Peggy Meadowcroft; as mother; on exile; in Quebec; her memoirs; death

Ignatieff, Nicholas (1832–1908), birth; early career; expedition to Khiva and Bokhara; expedition to Peking; marriage; ambassador to Constantinople; in Russo-Turkish War; as Minister of the Interior; retirement; death

Ignatieff, Nicholas (1904–52)

Ignatieff, Nicholas (‘little Nick')

Ignatieff, Paul N. (1797–1879)

Ignatieff, Paul (1870–1945), birth; childhood; adolescence; illness; education; farming career; military service; courtship and marriage; chairman of Kiev
zemstvo;
governor of Kiev; relations with father; as deputy Minister of Agriculture; as Maltsev heir; as Minister of Education; resignation and dismissal; as president, Russian Red Cross; arrest, imprisonment and release; as Sussex farmer; in retirement, Quebec; death

Ignatieff, Paul (1907–09)

Ignatieff, Vladimir

Ignatieff, Vladimir (‘Dima')

Irkutsk

Jews

Karamzin, Nicholas

Kerensky

Khiva

Khrushchev, Nikita

Kiev

Kishinev

Kislovodsk

Korea

Koulakoff

Krivoshein

Kroupodernitsa

Kutuzov, Mikhail

La Flandre

Lenin, V. I.

Leningrad

Lipovetz

London

Lower Canada College

Lytton, Lord

Macedonia

Malevsky, Colonel

Maltsev family

Manchuria

Marseilles

Matisse, Henri

McGill University

Meadowcroft, Peggy

Mestchersky, Princess Maria

Mestchersky, Prince Nicholas

Mestchersky, Peter

Mestchersky, Sasha

Mestchersky, Vera

Mestchersky, Prince Vladimir

Miliukov, P.

Mineralni Vodi

Misdroy

Misetsky, Judge

Mogilev

Montenegro

Montreal

Montrose,
SS

Moscow

Muraviev, Count

Nabokov, Vladimir (novelist)

Nabokov, Vladimir (father of novelist)

Napoleonic Wars

Nechaev, Professor

Nechaev-Maltsev, Y.

Nice

Nicholas I

Nicholas II

Nizhni Novgorod

Novodevichy cemetery

Novorossisk

Odessa

Okhrana

Orenberg

Orthodox church

Ottawa

Ottoman empire

Ouman

Ourousoff family

Oxus, river

Panin, Nikita

Panin, Peter

Paris

Parkin family

Pearson, L. B.

peasants

Peking

People's Will

Petrograd (St Petersburg)
passim

photography

Piatigorsk

Plevna

Pobedonostsev, K.

pogroms

Poland

Porechie

Preobrajensky Guards

Protopopoff

provisional government

Pugachev, E.

Pushkin Museum

Putney

Rachinsky, Professor

Rasputin, Grigori

Red Cross, Russian

revolution of 1905

revolution of March 1917

revolution of October 1917

Richmond, Quebec

Ross, river

Russo-Japanese War

Russo-Turkish War

St Paul's School

Salisbury, Lord

San Stefano, treaty of

Saturday Night,
magazine

self, the

Serbia

Shanghai

Sheremetieff, Countess

Shipka Pass

Shkuro, Andrei

Siberia

Slavonic Society

Slavophiles

Smolensk

Socialist Revolutionaries

Sontag, Susan

Soviet Union

Stalin, J. V.

Stolypin government

Sultan Abdul Aziz

Sussex

Tauride Palace

Tiesenhausen, Countess

Titanic,
SS

Tolstoy

Tonia

Toronto

Trotsky, L.

Tsarskoe Selo

Tsushima

Tsvetaev, Ivan

Turkey

Tursky, I.

typhoid

University of Toronto

Upper Melbourne, Quebec

Ussuri, river

Vaclav

Varna

Victoria, Queen

Vienna

Vladivostok

Volga, river

Vybiti

Wassiltchikoff, Boria

Wassiltchikoff, Sonia

Women's Battalion

Wrangel, General

zemski sobor

zemstvos

Zouroff family

A
LSO BY
M
ICHAEL
I
GNATIEFF

Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond

Isaiah Berlin: A Life

The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and Modern Conscience

Scar Tissue

Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism

The Needs of Strangers

A Just Measure of Pain

THE RUSSIAN ALBUM
. Copyright © 1987, 1997 by Michael Ignatieff. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Parts of the Afterword appeared in somewhat different form in
Blood and Belonging
(BBC Books and Chatto & Windus 1993, Vintage 1994)

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

ISBN 0-312-28183-8

First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd

First U.S. Edition: June 2001

eISBN 9781466889057

First eBook edition: November 2014