The Russian Album

August 4, 1987
As minister of education, Count Paul Ignatieff, the author's grandfather, resigned out of disgust from Czar Nicholas II's cabinet. A liberal, he tried to preserve statesmanlike traditions, but an increasingly reactionary regime stifled him. With the 1917 revolution he went into exile. While his wife Natasha cared for their five sons in England, then in Canada, the count immersed himself in White Russian emigre politics in Paris. The couple's reunion is one of the touching moments in this family history. The author, an expatriate Canadian living in London, combed family memoirs and made two trips to the Soviet Union to track down material on four generations of his aristocratic ancestors. He is not proud of his great-grandfather Nikolai, an imperial ambassador who persecuted Jews and plotted against the Ottoman Empire, yet he hides nothing. His painfully honest search for roots leads him to the realization, "You make yourself with your own hands, here and now.''