By the time I was there doing research for my first book, The Grace Effect, which is, in a sense, a history of Ukraine, there was a growing desire among many Ukrainians, some 16 percent, to reunite with Russia. Sixteen percent isn’t a majority, but it isn’t nothing, and it reflected the ideological fractures within this historically unstable region. My own interpreter on one of these visits, a Ukrainian, talked incessantly of his admiration for Stalin. He was not an anomaly at that time.