Michael Ignatieff — politician with roots in the Russian Empire
Michael Grant Ignatieff was born in Toronto in May 1947 into two lineages that had nothing in common except distinction. On his mother's side were the Grants, a Canadian academic dynasty: his grandfather and great-grandfather were both principals of Upper Canada College, another great-grandfather was principal of Queen's University, and the philosopher George Parkin Grant was his uncle. On his father's side were the Ignatievs, counts of the Russian Empire.
His great-grandfather, Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, was one of the most consequential Russian diplomats of the nineteenth century and later minister of the interior under Alexander III, who confirmed the family's countship in 1878. His grandfather, Count Pavel Nikolayevich Ignatiev - Paul - was born in Constantinople in 1870 where his father was ambassador, took a degree at the University of Kiev, and in January 1915 became minister of education in the government of Nicholas II. He held the post for not quite two years, resigning in December 1916 as he was about to be dismissed, his attempts to work with the Duma having been undercut from inside the cabinet. He was the last man to hold the office under the empire. In 1903 at Nice he had married Princess Natalia Nikolayevna Meshcherskaya; they had seven sons, two of whom died in infancy.
In 1918 Paul was imprisoned. His release was negotiated by people who had reason to be grateful to him, and in 1919 the family left, crossing the Black Sea on a British troop ship - passage arranged by the boys' English nanny, Peggy Meadowcroft. The youngest son aboard was George, aged six, the future father of Michael Ignatieff.
They reached London in 1919 with twenty-five thousand pounds, spent nearly a decade on an English country estate, and then took a rented farm outside Montreal with most of that money gone. Paul and Natalia died in Quebec in 1945 and 1944. George Ignatieff became a Rhodes scholar and then one of Canada's most senior diplomats: ambassador to Yugoslavia, permanent representative to NATO, ambassador to the United Nations and president of the Security Council in 1968-69. By his son's account the family made no attempt to trade on a vanished title, and Canadians cured them of any grandeur they might have retained.
Michael Ignatieff read history at Toronto and took a doctorate at Harvard, held posts at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto, and spent two decades in Britain as a broadcaster and writer. He led the Liberal Party of Canada and was leader of the Opposition from 2008 to 2011, and was rector and president of Central European University from 2016 to 2021.
In 1987 he wrote The Russian Album, an account of the family drawn from his grandparents' diaries and papers. It won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction.
"Grandparents fled Russia in 1919; family settled in Quebec"
Migration storyTracing the roots — St. Petersburg
His 1987 family memoir The Russian Album, written from his grandparents' diaries, won the Governor General's Award. Through the emigre family tree he is connected to Nick Clegg: Clegg's grandmother Baroness Kira von Engelhardt was a first cousin of Alla Ionova, who married a first cousin of George Ignatieff.
Grandson of Count Pavel Nikolayevich Ignatiev (1870-1945), the last minister of education of the Russian Empire, and Princess Natalia Nikolayevna Meshcherskaya; great-grandson of Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, diplomat and minister of the interior under Alexander III. The family left Russia in 1919 by British troop ship across the Black Sea and settled in Quebec.
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St. Petersburg. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"'My family's exile taught me that the past is never simply past — it is a country you carry inside you.'"