Review: Stalin
| Author | Serhy Yekelchyk |
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200606100324 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 778 | International Journal | Summer 2006 |
in the o utcome of the commission, as it bore most of the responsibility for
drafting the report (89).
This is an excellent examination of the inner workings of an extremely
important royal commission, and in tackling the problem the way he
does—through a thorough examination of the interplay of people, institu-
tions, and ideas—Inwood provides us with a model that I hope other
researchers will soon follow. There is so much delightful information in
this book that I can only wonder what we might glean by examining the
process followed by similarly bodies.
The problem, however, is that Inwood is not content to give us an
objective view of how royal commissions really work; instead, he wants to
explain “the key programmatic role of the Macdonald Commission in
Canada’s momentous change of course, facilitating as it did a transforma-
tive moment in the trajectory of Canadian economic development” (4). In
order to argue that the free trade advocated in the Macdonald commission
report was “transformative,” Inwood has to argue that protectionism was
the norm throughout most of Canada’s history. This ignores the temporary
nature of the first Macdonald’s “national policy” of high tariffs, and the
century that followed of near constant efforts on the part of Canadians to
negotiate a free trade deal with the US. Many will disagree with Inwood
on the “transformative” nature of the commission’s findings, instead
accepting Michael Hart’s view that Canada is a “trading nation” (the title of
his 2002 text for UBC Press) or J. L. Granatstein’s argument that free trade
between Canada and the US is the “issue that will not go away.” This dis-
agreement, however, should not affect the significance of this book. As a
study of royal commissions in Canada, Gregory Inwood has set the bar
very high indeed.
P. E. Bryden/University of Victoria
STALIN
A Biography
Robert Service
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. xviii, 715pp, US$29.95
cloth (ISBN 0-674-01697-1)
Many Stalin biographies have been published in a variety of languages. During
the decades when the Soviet archives remained inaccessible, historians
To continue reading
Request your trial