My mother and her sisters attended a Ukrainian Baptist church every week, my father never went to this church and occasionally would go to the Russian Orthodox Church. Occasionally I went with my father because I liked travelling through the inner suburbs of Melbourne by tram on a Sunday morning. Melbourne was always deserted on a Sunday in the 1970s. I remember in my teens I consciously was deciding whether to identify as “Ukrainian” or Russian. My mother had just returned from visiting her brother’s family in Montreal, Quebec. My mother asked me if I would be interested in accompanying her in the event of her returning there to live. I did give it some thought but was hesitant because my uncle was a Ukrainian nationalist and was incredibly rude and insulting to me some years previous when he visited us. I don’t think he respected the fact that my father was a Russian from Kursk. Both of my mother’s sisters lived in Essendon. Essendon was the centre of the Ukrainian community in ...
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I naively decided to play in my first chess tournament in nearly 15 years last October. I made it clear to one of the organisers that I would be seeking a bye on the Sunday to attend a Russian Orthodox Church service. When I read the tournament summary after the tournament had ended I read this tripe A completely unnecessary, cynical and snide comment. This is why honourable Russians refuse to engage in civil society with local descendants of convicts who have no respect for the religious convictions of Christians.

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