The Making of A Peacemonger: The Memoirs of George Ignatieff

Darlene Money was a writer in Mississauga, Ontario.

A pampered child of Russian aristocrats, George Ignatieff and his family fled the bloodshed and turmoil of the Russian revolution and civil war, settling first in England and then in Canada. As a Rhodes scholar in the late thirties, he met Lester Pearson, at whose urging he wrote the foreign service examination that launched his career as a civil servant and diplomat. During assignments in London, Washington, New York, and Ottawa, and as ambassador to Yugoslavia, NATO and the United Nations, Ignatieff participated in negotiations involving many of the crises of the mid-twentieth century: the Korean war, the partition of Palestine, Suez, Cuba, Cyprus, and the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Canada’s nuclear warheads dilemma of the early sixties marked the beginning of growing frustration for Ignatieff as a representative of the government of Canada, and, disillusioned by the dwindling status of the Department of External Affairs in the Diefenbaker and Trudeau years, he became provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto in 1971. He is now chancellor of the University.

A constant interest throughout Ignatieff’s career, beginning as early as his childhood escape from the tragic events in his native land, has been disarmament and the promotion of peace, which concerned him ever more urgently as the nuclear arms race continued.

The disappointment on reading these memoirs is that they arc so brief, and increasingly impersonal at each new turn of Ignatieff’s career. After the lively account of his childhood and youth in Europe and Canada, his comments are confined almost entirely to his public life, with only passing references to his family and his personal interests. However, because of Ignatieff’s particular focus on the countering of militarism and the primacy among his concerns of peacemaking and disarmament, his contribution in these memoirs to the documentation, by the individuals involved, of Canada’s international relations in the middle years of the century is an especially valuable one.