Tag: russia

Reflections on the 1956 Hungarian Uprising Remembrance

October 28, 2025

This week, I attended a flag-raising ceremony commemorating the sixty-ninth anniversary of the Hungarian uprising of October 23, 1956, at Ottawa City Hall. I looked forward to meeting some grey-haired Hungarian refugees, with whom I could make contact, talk about the old country, and share our experiences in Canada.

About fifty people showed up for the ceremony. I did hear a few people speaking Hungarian, chatting in small groups. They seemed happy to talk with each other. I went by myself, looking for some social interaction and discussion. Still, nobody seemed interested in making contact, even though I walked around and tried to break into conversations.  

When I found a young fellow standing by himself, I asked him if he was Hungarian. To my surprise, he said he was an RCMP officer. I wondered if he was on an assignment to ensure security at the event, requested because staff from the Hungarian Embassy and other diplomats were in attendance. the event organizers.

Another person I approached was a black woman who, with a friendly smile, explained  with a friendly smile that she was with the Nigerian Embassy and had been invited to this event. I found myself confused; while I understood the logic behind inviting certain European nations, I questioned the inclusion of African countries. Nevertheless, she was charming, and we talked about Africa and my trip to Tanzania.  

Although the flag-raising was outside, due to inclement weather, the group moved to City Hall first to listen to the speeches by the dignitaries. The small conference room inside was insufficient to seat everyone, so I stood in the hallway listening to the speakers.

The Deputy Mayor, Sean Devine, who, by the way, is my local City Councilor, opened the ceremony. He paid tribute to the courageous Hungarians who perished during the 1956 uprising and commented on the contributions the refugees made to Canada. Although Sean did not mention it, well-known people such as Anna Porter, a writer and publisher, and Robert Lantos, a film director, were fifty-sixers, among others.

Ms. Katalin Haas, Charge d’Affaires at the Hungarian Embassy, spoke about the significance of the 1956 rebellion and invited representatives of the Canada-Hungary Parliamentary Friendship Group and a representative of Global Affairs Canada to speak.

Many speakers mentioned the 38,000 people who arrived in Canada after the uprising looking for freedom and dignity and the over 300,000 people of Hungarian descent now residing here. All the speakers emphasized the Hungarian people’s desire for freedom and dignity.  

Adam van Koeverdan, Co-Chair of the Canada-Hungary Friendship Group, spoke about his mother, who escaped Hungary during the uprising. That made me feel old. I was sixteen years old when I fled Hungary, and he was talking about his mother! Further indicating my age was a group of young people talking about being fourth-generation Hungarians. I felt ancient by that time.

The speeches were well delivered but seemed hollow to me, as the speakers lacked a fundamental understanding of the nature of life in Hungary in the 1950s that sparked the rebellion. None of the speakers had firsthand experience of life in Hungary at the time of the rebellion. The speakers’ comments were sincere but lacked the emotional gravity that people with direct experience could have brought.

For example, I remember when our neighbor in the apartment house where we lived disappeared one night, and nobody said anything about it. Nobody raised any questions. Or when my father, a medical doctor, was called many nights to patch up people caught trying to break through the Iron Curtain or swim across Lake Ferto. Or when my brother, a student in Budapest, walked home to Sopron, a distance of 200 kilometers, when the revolution broke out. During the uprising, the absence of cell phones or live communication made it difficult to receive updates from him for several days. This lack of information caused considerable concern among our family about his safety. The family feared the worst. After coming home from school one day, our mother told Peter and me to set off along the highway to Vienna, each of us carrying a sandwich in our backpacks, a memory that has stayed with me ever since.  

I thought that a few refugees talking about their escape, or a film showing the tanks in Budapet crawling with students during the uprising, would have been relevant and impactful. However, I recognise that the objective of the ceremony was to honour those who lost their lives, rather than revisit the events of the uprising. Those people attending who were old enough to witness the rebellion personally may not have felt completely satisfied. I wondered, how many of us oldtimers attended?

The Book “Red Notice” by Bill Browder Brought up Memories

January 28, 2024

Published in 2015, Red Notice is a memoir spanning the period of Russia’s privatization of state assets during President Yeltsin’s time (1991 to 1999) and the rise of the oligarchs during President Putin’s time (from 2000). Browder noticed business opportunities spawned by privatization and took advantage of them but then ran afoul of the Russian political system, and the government deported him from Russia in 2005.

He returned home to London, but upon learning that his lawyer and friend Sergei Magnitsky died of a beating in Moscow on November 16, 2009, he became a human rights activist. The book describes his advocacy that resulted in the Magnitsky Act in the US, signed by President Obama in 2012.

Born into an intellectual and leftist Jewish family where science and mathematics were the only career choices, Bill rebelled and decided to become a capitalist.

Bill’s grandfather, Earl Browder, was a union organizer in the US. Russia invited him to live in Moscow, where he married and had three sons. When Earl came back to the US with his family, he became the head of the US Communist Party and ran for President in 1936 and 1940, becoming subject to the McCarthy witchhunts of real and perceived communists and jailed for sixteen months.

All of Earl’s sons became noted mathematicians in the US. Bill’s father, Felix, a child prodigy in maths, earned his Ph.D. from Princeton at age 20. He had trouble landing a job because of his father’s communist background. However, Eleanor Roosevelt, then Chair of the Board of Governors at Brandeis University, overruled the Board and hired Felix in 1955. Subsequently, Felix taught at the University of Chicago, Yale, and Princeton

Bill studied economics at the University of Chicago and earned an MBA from Stanford to pursue his career goals. The typical career ladder for MBAs led Bill to join investment banks, but he was not happy until he found an opportunity to go to Eastern Europe. He describes in his book that he longed for some experience that reminded him of his grandfather’s stay in Russia.

Bill describes in his book how the Yeltsin regime privatized state assets. Each Russian citizen received one share to buy any company’s share. Some people realized that accumulating shares cheaply was advantageous; most had no idea what the shares meant and sold them cheaply or for a drink.

Bill had the business training to value Russian companies, and by comparing them to similar companies in the West, he quickly realized that the Russian companies were way undervalued. And he thought he could make a fortune buying into the Russian oil and other companies.

But he needed money to invest, and the first part of the memoir describes his talent in raising capital by cold-calling, networking, and directly asking rich people to trust him to invest their money in Russia. The book reads like the who is who of people with millions of dollars in Europe, the Middle East, and the US.

Studying Russian companies, Bill discovered that the oligarchs, who controlled the enormous Russian companies with their accumulated shares, stole from their companies by splitting off parts of them and selling them to their friends and family at discounted prices. When President Putin came into power in 2000, he took advantage of Bill’s work exposing the corrupt oligarchs. Putin put some of them in jail – the prime example was Khodorkovsky of GasProm – and others agreed to Putin taking a portion of their profits to avoid prison. But when Putin took control of the oligarchs, he had no use for Bill anymore and kicked him out of Russia.

Bill moved back to London and published material on the corrupt business practices of the oligarchs, irritating Putin. In response to the bad publicity, the Russian police arrested Bill’s lawyer, Magnitsky, while other members of Bill’s Moscow staff escaped to London. Attempts to free Magnitsky failed despite newspaper articles and YouTube videos exposing the corruption in Russia. The bad publicity caused international condemnation, and Magnitsky’s jail conditions worsened, culminating in a deadly beating.

Learning of Magnitsky’s death, Bill had become depressed and swore revenge. Instead of focusing on his company, he spent most of this time trying to avenge his friend’s death. As a first step, he collected information on those who contributed to Magnitsky’s death.

Armed with this information, Bill lobbied Senators Durbin and McCain to sponsor a bill to sanction all those responsible for Magnitsky’s death. There is a detailed description of how Bill lobbied, working with the US government and Congress to advocate for the bill. The ultimate result was that Senators Durbin and McCain pushed the Magnitsky Act through Congress, subsequently signed by President Obama in 2012.

Browder has an eye for detail, and I found it fascinating to learn of the people Bill has known. For example, Bill worked with Crysthia Freeland in Moscow when she was the bureau head for the Financial Times. Freeland is the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister in Canada today. He also talks about lunches in specific locations with dates. Maybe he journaled, or he has a fantastic memory.

The book reminded me of my early life living in Hungary under Russian rule in the 1950s. At that time, the state owned most of the property in Hungary, and there was no tax since the government employed all the people and provided all services. There was no private industry. And the secret police were all over. People disappeared overnight, and nobody asked any questions for fear of being the next one to disappear. The socialist system resulted in poverty, much like the situation Browder describes in Russia.

Further enhancing my interest in the book, Felix Browder, Bill’s father, was my brother Peter’s advisor at Yale University for his doctoral dissertation in mathematics in 1964.

Where to Ukrainian Refugees?

April 30, 2023

Ukraine is preparing for a major attempt to recover some of the territory lost to the Russians. It is over a year ago that Russia initiated an unprovoked war on Ukraine, calling it a “special operation”, a euphemism by any stretch of the imagination for what it is, a war. This “special operation” displaced over fifteen million people in Ukraine, and over eight million people left the country.

Under the Canada Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET) program, Canada offered to take in an unlimited number of Ukrainians seeking shelter from the war. To date, close to a million applications have been received under this program, of which two-thirds have been approved, and 150,000 have already arrived in Canada.

This new immigration program  (CUAET) was developed for, and with, Ukrainians, and it provides temporary residence status for three years for successful applicants, with $3,000 for each adult and $1,500 for each child. After three years, those Ukrainians who want to stay in Canada can apply for permanent residence.

A major benefit of CUAET is that the newcomers can work immediately in Canada. A major disadvantage of the program is that people arriving under the CUAET do not receive many of the social adjustment programs that refugees receive, such as housing assistance.

The Ukrainians prefer this new program to the refugee program because it allows them to work immediately while the latter takes much longer to gain resident status that permits work. And many Ukrainians want to go home, hoping for an end to the war in less than three years. Many left families at home, including husbands, who could not leave because of their obligation to serve in the military.

Thinking about the Russian invasion, which started during the Covid pandemic, I wondered how the virus affected Ukrainians. Only thirty-five percent of Ukrainians were vaccinated against Covid in 2022 (compared to the eighty percent vaccination rate in Canada). War is tough during a pandemic; people escape to refugee camps where the crowding provides the perfect environment for the spread of the airborne virus.

The numbers bear out the damage Covid wrought on Ukraine; five million people got infected and 100,000 people died out of their population of thirty-two million (compared to Canada where also five million people got infected, and fifty-one thousand people died out of a population of forty-eight million people).  

The adversities faced by Ukrainians forced many to leave their country, and it reminded me of my experience escaping from Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

Hungary was under Russian occupation from 1944 when the Russians defeated Germany. The spontaneous uprising of 1956 provided a window to escape the prison-like existence in Hungary. Many people left their families behind but those who left had no intention of returning home, in contrast to the recent Ukrainian exodus.  

We came to Canada as refugees, which was a new program developed for the Hungarians by then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. Over 35,000 Hungarians arrived in Canada following the uprising in 1956.

I remember what we had to do to adjust to Canadian life: learn  English, acquire usable skills, go back to school, and secure a job to make a living. It took a few years to start a modest life in an apartment and a few more years to buy our first car. Father had to redo his university coursework in medicine and certification for a medical license, including residency with twenty-four-hour shifts at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. My older brother and I attended university and worked part-time as well as full-time during the summers to cover university costs. Mother worked at a store. Immigrants go through multi-year adjustments to settle in a country new to them.   The first few years were not easy, but my parents were determined they would not return to Hungary.

Many of the recently arrived Ukrainians have a different goal; they hope to return home after the war. A worthwhile wish but is it reasonable? Negotiations between the two warring parties have not been initiated and are unlikely to be successful since both sides have firm and non-negotiable positions. Militarily, the two sides are at a standstill, Ukraine assisted by NATO and Russia assisted by North Korea, and other countries with weaponry. A resolution seems elusive. It may take years. 

And in time, immigrants embrace the new country they settle in and get to like it. I remember a handful of Hungarian refugees who decided to go home after a few years.  They could not acquire a workable knowledge of the English language mostly because of sticking with family members and speaking Hungarian all the time. They could not get used to Canadian culture, especially gender equality in Canada. They also missed their family back home. And they were all older. But the great majority of the Hungarian refugees stayed and prospered in Canada.

I do not believe you ever go home and feel at home in the old country you left. You have changed and your old country has changed and going home is a disappointing experience. And this will be especially true of Ukraine with the devastation of its cities by the Russian bombing. Reconstruction will take years.

I think most Ukrainians who have come to Canada over the past year will stay and prosper here.

My Questions for the Canadian Immigration Minister

November 5, 2022

The Minister announced yesterday that Canada will welcome 500,000 immigrants annually. He said the country needs to move up immigration targets because of the low fertility rate and a million vacant jobs in Canada. But, Mr. Minister, have you fully considered the costs of a sudden surge in immigration, and the impacts on healthcare and housing in Canada?

Canada used to welcome a quarter million immigrants annually, ramping up to 300,000 recently. The number jumped to over 400,000 in 2001 and is likely to approach 500,000 this year.

Immigration policy in Canada has evolved. Initially, immigrants were invited in the 18th century to colonize the west, coming mostly from the British Isles. Central Europeans came early in the 20th century. People coming to work in Canada created the “economic class” of immigrants, and their families followed them (called the “family reunification” class of people). The “refugee” class of people was created under Prime Minister Diefenbaker, who welcomed 37,500 Hungarian refugees escaping their country after the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Sixty percent of immigrants today fall into the “economic” class. India is the source of 32% of today’s immigrants, followed by China at 8%.

Besides economic development, demographics have become a new policy issue for Canada because of our low fertility rate of 1.5%, the replacement rate is 2.1%. So, the question comes to mind: have we tried to influence fertility rates? Many countries have tried it with limited success (Russia, and France, for example). Changing behavior is difficult, so let’s bring more people into the country to boost our population.

But the devil is in the details. Of the two major sources of immigrants to Canada today, India’s fertility rate was 2.1% in 2021 and China’s 1.7%. If immigrants from these two countries continue to follow their culture, they may not help with Canadian fertility rates. But would this flow of immigrants help with the economy?

A target group for the Minister is the science, technology, engineering, and math people (STEM). Yes, we have a million vacant jobs, but most are in the service industries, the hospitality and retail industries, and not in STEM. So this group of immigrants may not help fill the vacant jobs we have in Canada, especially when technology people are being laid off these days (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter).

A related question I have for the Minister is: what do we do with the one million unemployed people in Canada and another half million people who stopped looking for work? We have one and one-half million people who could be employed. Retraining may make them employable. It may not be in the Immigration Minister’s mandate to solve labor shortages via retraining, but it begs the question: should we look at the unemployed and the stay-at-home people for filling vacant positions in Canada before filling these jobs with immigrants?

And the Minister has not talked about the cost of immigration, except for the benefits to the GDP and the income taxes immigrants will pay. But clearly, immigrants need services like healthcare and housing, provided by lower levels of government. We, the taxpayers, pay all government taxes – federal, provincial and local – so perhaps it is time to reflect on the costs of immigration.

At a time when healthcare is already breaking at the seams with doctors’ shortages and nurses retiring, an increase in immigration will put an additional load on the system. (Six million people in Canada do not have a family doctor. Some emergency rooms have closed due to a lack of nursing staff). You say that, of course, we should target doctors and nurses in the immigration program. Makes sense. But do you realize that both professions require certification by relevant authorities and the reality in Canada is that foreign doctors and nurses must qualify before they can practice?

For example, I had a technician perform an ”ultrasound” procedure on me and I found out that she was a medical doctor from Belarus and took all the Canadian exams to become a doctor but failed to get residency in a hospital required for certification and was forced to take a technician’s job.

Yes, Mr. Minister, we have a supply problem: we need more doctors and nurses and immigration will not provide a quick fix because of certification barriers.

And immigrants need housing. On average, 200,000 housing units are built in Canada annually. The half million immigrants coming to Canada each year could use a few hundred thousand units and drive-up housing prices, especially given the present housing shortage (for example, the Premier of Ontario recently announced a sweeping housing plan to ease the shortage of housing).

Preserving and increasing the value of current homeowners’ units may be good for the homeowners, but difficult for young Canadians who would like to get into the housing market. Has the Minister thought through how the half million immigrants coming into the country each year impact housing markets?

And my questions to the Minister would not be complete without asking about “absorption rates” for immigrants in Canada. Absorption refers to the ease with which immigrants assimilate or integrate into Canadian society: get a job, acquire housing, have their children in school, and become a part of their local community.

Ethnic groups like to settle near each other for comfort. When a large group of immigrants settles in an area – that often happens – ghettos may result and integration into Canadian society may take the back seat. Has the Minister studied how many immigrants can Canada absorb annually?

There are costly impacts on education and social services at the local level when immigrants arrive. Teaching the official languages of Canada to immigrants is a significant cost for school boards. For example, Quebec has 23% of Canada’s population and could take up to 117,000 of the 500,000 immigrants, but the Premier said their capacity to teach the French language is limited to 50,000 people annually. Has the Minister discussed how many immigrants each province would take?

I am for immigration; I was an immigrant myself and found my journey to assimilate into Canadian society has been challenging but tremendously satisfying (it never stops). But I ask the Minister whether he has thought about the impact immigrants will have on our healthcare system, our housing situation today, and our experience with integrating immigrants successfully into our society when suddenly we’ll receive a half million newcomers each year.

Mixing of the Races?

August 17, 2022

Viktor Orban, the far-right Hungarian Prime Minister, said “We, Hungarians, are not a mixed race…and we do not want to become a mixed race”, in a speech in Romania, in July 2022. I thought his idea was pathetic nonsense. But wait. Let’s examine what his consequential statement means.

The Huns occupied Hungary over a thousand years ago. Since that time, and also because Hungary is the crossroads between Asia and the west, hordes from the east have invaded and trampled on its land many times. As well, the Germans and Russians occupied it recently. No question that intermarriage has happened, witnessed by the names in Hungary and words borrowed from the Turkish, French, German people, and others. Hungarian people today have a rich ancestry of people from many countries. There are Polish, German, and Hun names in my ancestry, among others, but we called ourselves Hungarian. So what does Orban talk about when he says that Hungarians are not a mixed race?

In the same speech, Orban also said “countries where European and non-Europeans mingle were no longer nations”. Aha! Now you say that Orban is OK with the mixing of European people but not others. Who could these others be? He meant African migrants who came to Europe over the past ten years. And, of course, Africans are Arabs and Blacks and many are Moslems. They have different skin colors and religions. He is against these people coming into Europe: there can be no other interpretation of his comments.

The reaction to his comments was swift both in Hungary and in Europe: he was called racist and his statement was out of the Nazi playbook on racial purity.

We can identify race as humans with similar and distinctive physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair texture. But race has no specific identifiers in the human genome. There is only one race: “homo sapiens”. Altho race is a social construct, it has developed connotations for social exclusion, discrimination, and violence towards certain social groups. We often express it in a social hierarchy with white-skinned people with privilege over darker-skinned people.

Unfortunately for Orban, the trend does not support his thesis: the trend is toward increasing interracial marriages. Partially, it is because of migration patterns, people move from Africa to northern locations. It is also because of increased educational levels; with higher education, there is less prejudice. Sometimes it results from the lack of available partners. For example, many men perish in wars, and the incarceration rate among blacks in the US is high.

In Canada, five percent of marriages were interracial, according to the 2011 census. The rate was ten percent in the city of Vancouver. In the US, over eight percent of marriages are interracial, while ten percent of marriages were interracial in 2015. In Honolulu, forty-two percent of marriages are interracial, while in Las Vegas it is thirty percent and in Santa Barbara, CA, it is thirty percent.

There are many people with mixed-race parentage. Just think of President Obama or our own Governor General Mary Simon. My older brother married a Chinese woman from Hong Kong. Peter and Angela had lived in Hong Kong and Toronto. The family accepted and got along well with Peter’s wife. I enjoyed the diversity Peter brought into the family. You may know some people, in your family or outside, who married someone of another race. So what the hell is Orban talking about? The future is already here; interracial marriage is now.