Two Colours

About the Book

A nearly century-old mother narrates her life story to her son. This was a life of struggle and tragedy for many Ukrainian people in the twentieth century. In 1917, the revolution, a plague with red commissars, descended upon Ukraine and her people. Anna, my mother, said that life turned into red and black colours: red stars and the big black guns of the commissars. Millions died under their unjust, oppressive regime, and Anna and her family were confined in a dungeon out on the deserted steppes; they were all doomed to perish. The commissars took all the people’s grain and other products; the merciless Golodomor, suffocation by hunger, killed many millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. And very soon, there was one more disaster: World War II, which stormed through the deeply wounded country, killing again many millions because Stalin and the other Kremlin rulers made this possible. My father, Ivan, was a pilot of a dive-bomber, lost his life in the war; like many millions of soldiers, he was betrayed by the Communist regime.

About the Author

Leonard was born in Ukraine and is a marine biologist/ichthyologist. He is also a PhD researcher, chief of scouting research voyages through the Arctic and Atlantic Ocean, from Greenland and Labrador Sea to Weddell Sea and Drake Passage of Antarctica. He took part in international negotiations in the field of fisheries; served as executive secretary of the North-West Atlantic Fisheries Organisation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, from 1991 to 2002; and has written articles for many professional publications in Russian and English.