Ray Torbiak

Ray Torbiak is a Canadian physician living in Ontario. His interests include twentieth-century history, narrative-based medicine, music, trivia and hockey. Novichok is his first novel.

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In the 1980s I read a book titled "The Harvest of Sorrow" by Robert Conquest, a PhD thesis detailing the Stalinist famines of the 1930s. I found the history of communism and dictatorships in general to be the car crash I can't look away from. My great-grandparents arrived in Canada in 1906, having foreseen the oppression that would be their fate if they stayed on their farms in western Ukraine near Romania.

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The horrors of Hitler's time, Mao Tse-Tung's Long March, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Bashar Al-Assad. These people make history while their victims are voiceless and forgotten. Now we have VV Putin trying to cobble the USSR back together, saturating the earth in blood, diesel and unexploded landmines. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 was Putin's green light.

 

This book is my hopeful rallying cry to the people of Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. It's my thank-you to the people of Poland, Finland, and to every nation that has stood on the side of freedom against the perpetrators of tyranny and aggression. We haven't forgotten them and we aren't looking away.

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