How Michael Ignatieff became Canadian

OTTAWA – During the recent parliamentary crisis, a Liberal MP’s constituent proposed the Governor General appoint "a fellow aristocrat, His Highness Count Ignatieff" to form an alternative government.

It was tongue-in-cheek advice. But, as in all good humour, it contained kernels of truth.

If it weren’t for nearly a century of history since the Bolshevik Revolution, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff would be a count today; perhaps living on the grand estate bequeathed to his ancestors by Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias.

That’s a big `if,’ of course. In fact, the Mestchersky country palace, where his grandmother Natasha was born a princess, was destroyed in 1917, the first year of the revolution that brought the 300-year Romanov dynasty to a bloody end.

Ignatieff says the idea of him being a Russian count "seems ridiculous" today, although it is a true account of what could have been.

Ignatieff’s chances of inheriting the title faded in 1919, as his grandparents, Count Paul and Countess Natasha, and their five sons steamed across the Black Sea on a filthy British troop ship, fleeing the Russian Revolution.

Ignatieff’s father George was the youngest son, age six. The boys’ English nanny, Peggy Meadowcroft, had arranged their passage to exile.

It was another decade, or so, before the family settled in Quebec. They did not cling to vanished glories.

"When my father arrived in Canada, people made jokes about the `Count of no count’ and those jokes stuck," Ignatieff said in an interview with Canwest News Service.

"Canadians cured my family of any illusions of grandeur they might have had about 60 years ago."

In April 1878, Czar Alexander II ennobled the Ignatieffs, promoting his great-great-grandfather Paul to Count of the Russian Empire and declaring all his male descendants would take the title of Count.

It was a reward for long and loyal military and diplomatic service to Czars Nicholas I and Alexander II, dating back to the Decembrist uprising in 1825 when Paul Ignatieff commanded a company of imperial guards who put down a mutiny at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

So it was that Ignatieff’s great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Paul and father George and his four uncles each inherited the title of Count.

As a member of the imperial regiment called the Preobrajensky Guards, Ignatieff’s great-great-grandfather helped drive Napoleon out of Russia and decades later, was assigned protector of the throne when the Czar was on the front during the 1887-88 Russian-Turkish war, leaving the Czarina and her strange adviser Rasputin in charge.

Ignatieff’s great-grandfather Nicholas was a diplomat who forged the San Stefano peace treaty after the Russian war on Turkey and was considered the father of modern Bulgaria, having redrawn the borders in the war’s wake.

Ignatieff’s grandfather Paul was a governor of the province of Kyiv, now in Ukraine, and served as education minister to Nicholas II, the last Czar of Russia.

The family history is so compelling that Ignatieff wrote The Russian Album, an award-winning book about it, two decades ago.

He was fortunate to have the diaries of his grandparents, who in the 1930s, settled in Upper Melbourne in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, from which to draw.

His grandfather Paul, whose efforts to negotiate with the Russian parliament were sabotaged by another minister, resigned as education minister as he was about to be fired by the Czar in November 1916.

In 1919, as the Reds and the Whites fought for control of the Caucasus region where he was taking spa cures for depression and pain, Paul decided to save his family by fleeing the country. He had been freed from prison and had escaped possible execution.

Ignatieff’s father would become a renowned Canadian diplomat, moving the family so often that Ignatieff says his beacons of continuity in childhood were the treasures from his grandmother’s trunk. They were displayed wherever the family lived.

Among them were a silver basin and pitcher in which his grandmother washed her hands each morning at the Mestchersky estate; a necklace of turquoise stars encrusted with diamonds that the Turkish Sultan Abdul Aziz had given his great grandmother, Princess Ekaterina Galitzine; and volumes of an embossed red leather history of Russia, written by another relative, Nicholas Karamzin.

Ignatieff said the water pitcher is on a stand in his apartment in Toronto and his wife Zsuzanna inherited a star from the necklace, which she wears on "very, very, very special occasions."

When younger, Ignatieff feared he could become trapped in his family history.

Today, he dwells on their immigrant story.

"My grandmother and grandfather were extraordinary people in their capacity not to be consumed by nostalgia and regret," he said. "I find genuine inspiration from that."

Their story informs what he says is a key question in Canadian politics – whether Canada provides the opportunity for success to today’s immigrants that were available to his grandparents and their children.

"The part of my family story that means most to me now is that they never complained, they never sat back and waxed nostalgic about the vanished glories, they rolled their sleeves up," Ignatieff said.

"They just adored this country from the minute they set foot on it. And their parents, who had lost everything, just pushed them forward. And I feel that kind of gentle hand pushing me forward, too."