In July 2024, I took my first trip to Ottawa to see the history of our capital city.
Over the course of about six days, I visited some of Canada’s most prestigious museums.
The Museum of History, the Canadian War Museum, the Diefenbunker and the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum.
At each location, one name kept coming up.
When I went for a walk with a friend, she pointed out to me that the building we had just passed was the apartment of that same man.
I knew his name, and the basics of what he did.
He arrived in Canada in the 1940s and made a decision that changed the course of history by setting the stage for the Cold War.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today we are cracking open some secret files to dive into the spy thriller story of the Igor Gouzenko Affair!
Canada and the Soviet Union had for the most part a tumultuous relationship.
Prior to 1917 and the Russian Revolution, which ended the rule of the Czar, Canada had little interaction with Russia. Foreign matters were handled by the United Kingdom, since we were a mere dominion of the empire.
In fact, until 1931, Canada’s foreign policy was dictated by the United Kingdom.
Following the revolution in 1923, the Soviet Union sent its first trade representative to Canada, but that warming relationship suffered a rupture four years later when it was discovered the Soviets stole classified material from a military base in England.
If the United Kingdom didn’t like someone, Canada didn’t either.
When the Statute of Westminster was enacted in 1931, Canada gained more powers over its foreign affairs.
Despite this, the relationship between the Soviets and Canada did not improve much.
As the Great Depression raged, communism was a growing movement within the country.
People were looking to replace what they saw as the failed experiment of capitalism.
The federal government under R.B. Bennett and the Conservatives were deeply anti-communist and saw any strike or union activity during the early-1930s as a Soviet plot.
This greatly impacted foreign relations with any communist country and things hit a low point in 1939 when the Soviets invaded Poland with Germany, and Canada went to war with the two European powers.
But it was not meant to last.
Within two years, enemies became friends, and friends became enemies.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.
It was to become the largest and costliest land offensive in human history, leaving 10 million soldiers and eight million civilians dead.
As soon as Germany attacked the Soviet Union, its former ally, changed sides in the Second World War. The Soviet Union was now on the same side as Canada in the war and relations thawed.
In August and September of 1941, Canada led a force to evacuate 2,000 Soviet miners located in German-occupied Norway.
Things continued to improve and in June 1942, Canada and the Soviet Union opened diplomatic relations, and soon after the Soviets opened their first embassy in Ottawa.
As the war went on, Canada’s importance among the allies increased.
Canadians were in important positions, and they were given scientific, military and diplomatic secrets.
This included everything from work being done to develop radar, to the creation of the first atomic bomb.
The Soviets and Canada may have been allies, but it wasn’t long before a network of spies began to operate out of the Ottawa embassy, led by Lt. Colonel Nikolai Zabotin.
His work was so secretive that the Soviet ambassador, Georgi Zarubin, had no idea what was happening under his nose.
One man who worked with Zabotin was an intelligence officer and cipher clerk by the name of Igor Gouzenko.
And he was about to change the 20th century forever.
Igor Gouzenko was born on Jan. 26, 1919, in a small village 100 kilometres northwest of Moscow. Of Ukrainian heritage, he was the youngest of four children.
His older brother, also named Igor, died when he was only one. The younger Igor was named after his deceased brother.
Gouzenko’s early life was not easy.
His father died of typhoid while fighting for the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, leaving his mom to raise the children alone.
Gouzenko’s mother taught mathematics, but the revolution made living extra difficult, so she sent her youngest son to live with her mother Ekaterina outside Ryazan to the west.
Gouzenko lived with his grandmother for the next few years until the revolution ended and he was reunited with his mother.
As a young man, Gouzenko was highly intelligent, and spent most of his time at the Lenin Library in Moscow, reading books on a wide assortment of subjects.
The Lenin Library didn’t just broaden his mind. It also changed his life.
While attending the Moscow Architectural Institute, and studying at the library, he met Svetlana Gouseva.
It was love at first sight, and soon after they met, they married.
But their lives were about to change as The Second World War began soon after, and the entire country was thrown into the war effort.
Gouzenko was recruited to be a cipher clerk where he would encrypt and decrypt highly secretive messages.
He was then drafted into the Red Army and given the rank of lieutenant.
He worked directly under Colonel Nikolai Zabotin and gained information about the espionage the Soviets were conducting.
After one year working in Moscow, Gouzenko was given new orders.
He was to accompany Zabotin to Ottawa, where he would handle transmissions to and from Moscow.
He was joined by his wife Svetlana, who was pregnant with their first child.
They may not have known it at the time, but they would never again return to the Soviet Union.
For Gouzenko and his wife, Canada was a revelation, they had been led to believe that living was tough in capitalist countries such as Canada and the United States. That view was immediately shattered as soon as they arrived.
They landed in Edmonton to take a train to Ottawa and saw piles of oranges at the train station.
Gouzenko had only tasted an orange once in his life and was shocked by the abundance.
Upon their arrival in Ottawa, the family was given an apartment at 511 Somerset Street.
The apartment was by no means large, but it was bigger than anything the Gouzenkos had enjoyed before. He said,
“I heard Zabotin remark more than once that living abroad spoiled some Russians. It had certainly spoiled Anna and me. In Ottawa we had a comfortable apartment of our own. In Moscow a place that size would have been shared by four or five families.”
The fact the family was allowed to live outside the embassy was unusual.
Typically, the Soviet Union kept tight control on its staff, and most lived within the embassy.
But the Gouzenkos had a newborn baby named Andrei and his. crying had annoyed Nicholai Zabotin’s wife to such an extent that the Gouzenkos were given permission to live away from the embassy.
The Gouzenkos were thousands of kilometres from Moscow, but the long arm of the Soviet Union stretched even into their home.
Every so often, a limousine would pull up and two or three men would get out and go into the apartment.
No one knew who these men were, but they were in fact from the Russian Embassy checking on the family.
According to Gouzenko’s neighbour Clare Anderson, if you looked up at the Gouzenko home from Somerset Street, the first thing you saw was a large portrait of Joseph Stalin in the living room.
She described Gouzenko as a quiet man, as did his neighbour David Conlan who said,
“He was a very quiet chap, a mousy type of fellow.”
Meanwhile Gouzenko and Svetlana were shocked by the abundance they saw around them.
They were so taken aback by it that instead of going to the movies they went to the grocery store to simply look at the amount, and variety, of food available to purchase.
Gouzenko began to love living in Canada, where he could move freely without police surveillance, and openly criticize the government without worry he would disappear.
Within the home, the family rarely talked about what they saw in Canada.
They believed, likely correctly, that there were microphones in their home.
Svetlana Gouzenko said,
“Usually, we go out in the park and would leave the baby carriage a few feet away because the carriage could have a bug. And we would walk away a little bit and then we would discuss, and we would never come near the same tree to discuss matters. We were cautious.”
Gouzenko talked with his neighbours and asked Margaret McDonald how much she and her husband paid for their apartment, and how much a person had to make to buy a car or how much furniture a family was allowed.
What may have seemed like innocent, if unusual questions, were clues that Gouzenko may not have wanted to return to the Soviet Union.
He wasn’t just worried about leaving Canada. He was also terrified that if he left, he would never make it to Moscow.
He had seen cipher clerks leave for overseas postings, but he never saw them return.
During the Stalin Era in the Soviet Union, it was common for people to disappear suddenly for the smallest of infractions, or even no infraction at all.
Some may have been killed outright, while others were sent to the dreaded gulag.
The Siberian gulags, or forced labour camps, were well known to Soviet citizens.
They were used as an instrument of political repression and punishment.
Between 1930 and 1953, 1.6 million people died in the gulags.
Gouzenko was an intelligent man, and he believed the reason cipher clerks were disappearing was because of what they learned on the job.
His friend, John Picton, a reporter in Ottawa, said,
“He suspected that was what was going to happen to him, because they get to know too much.”
In September 1944, Gouzenko got the news he was dreading. The family was recalled to the Soviet Union.
This was unexpected as Gouzenko still had two years left on his post in Ottawa.
He believed he was being recalled early for either knowing too much, or for having made a mistake.
Either way, it was bad news.
This left him with only two choices.
Return to Moscow and hope he wasn’t being sent to a Siberian gulag or stay in Canada and become a defector.
It was a tough choice between death or exile.
The War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, but the War in the Pacific continued, and it was expected to be a long and violent fight to push the Japanese back.
That is until Aug. 6, 1945, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, followed three days later with another on Nagasaki.
The bombings killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people.
Six days after Nagasaki was left in ruins, Japan surrendered to the Allies.
Two weeks later on Sept. 2, the surrender documents were signed and the bloodiest war in human history came to an end.
Throughout Canada, celebrated.
You will remember from my episode about the Halifax Riot in early 2024 that some Canadians celebrated a bit too much.
As the party raged on inside the home of Igor Gouzenko a decision was made.
Gouzenko had been able to delay his departure to Moscow by getting permission from his boss Nikolai Zabotin, but time was quickly running out.
His replacement, Lt. Kulakov had already arrived in July 1945, and it was only a matter of time before Gouzenko had to leave.
With a second child on the way, Gouzenko made the decision to defect.
On Sept. 5, 1945, three days after the war ended, Gouzenko carried a briefcase full of documents and walked out of the Soviet embassy for the last time.
Under his shirt were more documents he had stolen.
Svetlana said he had to suck his stomach the entire time, so no one noticed what he was hiding.
These documents included telegrams from Zabotin, pages from his notebook and information on Allied weapons including the atomic bomb.
Gouzenko had planned it down to the last detail knowing just how dangerous the situation would be not only for himself, but his entire family.
For months he had copied and stolen documents slowly and kept them hidden in his home.
He knew that to be granted asylum in Canada, he needed to provide something of value to the government.
At first, he thought about going to the RCMP because he knew from his work at the embassy that the Soviets did not have military agents in the force.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure that there were no NKVD, or KGB, agents in the ranks.
RCMP officer Cecil Bayfield said,
“He was afraid to come to the police in the first place because he didn’t trust them. He told us that. He trusted the newspapers, but he didn’t trust the police.”
Not wanting to risk getting caught on the same day he defected, Gouzenko went to the Ottawa Journal and met with the editor-in-chief but then backed out of making a statement.
He left the office, only to return later but the editor-in-chief was not there, and the night editor Chester Frowde had trouble understanding Gouzenko’s broken English.
Gouzenko was highly agitated and kept repeating,
“It’s war, it’s war. It’s Russia.”
Not knowing what else to do, Frowde suggested that he go to the RCMP.
Still fearful of Soviet spies in the RCMP, Gouzenko went to the Department of Justice instead.
Unfortunately, by the time he arrived, the office was closed.
What followed was a nerve-wracking night for Gouzenko.
He was not under the protection of Canadian authorities, and the Soviets could have burst into his home at any moment after discovering him.
But no one came.
The next morning, with Svetlana and Andrei, he went to the Department of Justice to see Minister of Justice Louis St. Laurent.
St. Laurent was still three years away from becoming Prime Minister of Canada, but at the time he was a respected Member of Parliament who had held the justice portfolio for four years.
Gouzenko and his family sat waiting for hours to see him, only to be denied an appointment and time was running out.
It may have seemed like he was getting nowhere, but his visit to the Department of Justice had already raised some eyebrows.
Then Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, had been informed by the undersecretary of state, Norman Robertson, that Gouzenko had gone to see St. Laurent, claiming he was holding classified Soviet secrets.
The war had just ended, and he believed that the Soviets were allies who had sacrificed millions of young men to fight against the Nazis on the Eastern Front. He was also terrified of sparking another war, so he wasn’t eager to see what Gouzenko was holding.
Prime Minister King wanted to find a diplomatic solution to avoid upsetting the Soviet Union.
Norman Robertson, the undersecretary for external affairs, pushed King to grant asylum to Gouzenko because his life was in danger.
King reportedly refused, stating Gouzenko should be handed over.
Luckily for Gouzenko, a new man entered his story completely by chance.
William Stephenson.
William Stephenson was one of the most fascinating Canadians of the 20th century.
Born in Winnipeg in 1897, he served Canada during the First World War as a soldier and pilot. Following the war, he invented a method to transmit photographic images via wireless that netted him a fortune which he used to invest in several industries, which connected him with many governments including that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Through his business contacts, Stephenson discovered that the Nazis were building up their armed forces and hiding billions of dollars in military expenses.
This was a clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and he alerted a British MP named Winston Churchill who used that information to warn against the appeasement policies of the British government at the time.
When the Second World War broke out, Stephenson became a spymaster, a senior representative for the British Security Coordination under the code name Intrepid.
It was his job to hand British scientific secrets to the Americans, and relay secrets back to the British.
He was also tasked with changing American public opinion from isolationism to entry into the Second World War.
He ONLY reported to Winston Churchill.
If that wasn’t enough to dazzle you, he also trained covert agents including children’s author Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming.
Fleming allegedly even said that the real-life version of James Bond was William Stephenson.
So, ya…James Bond is Canadian.
By the end of the war, Stephenson, who was now knighted by special request from Winston Churchill, was a very powerful individual.
And he just happened to have a dinner reservation at the Royal Ottawa Golf and Country Club with Norman Robertson for Sept. 5, 1945.
When Stephenson called Robertson to ask what time they were meeting for dinner, Robertson told him that things had changed, and he needed to get to the country club immediately.
A few hours later, while sitting on a couch in the country club, Robertson brought Stephenson up to speed about the Igor Gouzenko situation.
Stephenson, the man with every western leader on speed dial, immediately gave his total support to Robertson to protect Gouzenko despite what Prime Minister King had ordered.
Robertson was to call the RCMP and rescind the order to take Gouzenko into custody and instead place him under surveillance and protective custody.
Gouzenko didn’t know it, but he had one of the most powerful men in the western world in his corner.
Gouzenko and his family were terrified they had made a decision that was going to cost them their lives.
From their perspective, no one cared about the stolen Soviet documents.
On the night of Sept. 6, 1945, Gouzenko and his family returned to their apartment fully expecting to be nabbed by the Soviets.
Gouzenko likely knew that rumours would be swirling about him among both Canadian and Soviet operatives in Ottawa.
The fact he didn’t go into work that day also didn’t help to keep his defection a secret.
The Soviets had discovered the missing documents, and they were on their way.
Gouzenko saw two men out in a car looking up at his apartment.
He believed they were Soviets, but they were in fact two RCMP members who had been tasked with monitoring him, But Gouzenko was not going to leave anything to chance. That night, he took his family to the neighbour across the hall and stayed there.
At some point in the middle of the night, four NKVD officers burst into the apartment looking for him and the papers he stole.
RCMP officers John McCulloch and Tom Walsh, who had been outside the building, went inside when they saw the Russians enter the apartment. quote
“We got upstairs and here was the door smashed right open. I walked in with my gun in my hand and had the whole four of them in the parlour as you go in.”
McCulloch asked them what they were doing, and they stated they were from the Russian Embassy and were looking for a cipher clerk named Igor Gouzenko.
Across the hall, Igor Gouzenko watched everything unfold from his neighbour’s keyhole.
The Russians left, empty handed.
Gouzenko knew he couldn’t hide forever, and eventually the long arm of the Soviets would find him.
Except……. there was a man standing in the bushes that night, watching everything unfold.
William Stephenson.
As soon as the Russians left, the RCMP wanted to transport Gouzenko and his family to a remote lodge in Quebec.
Before they could, Stephenson and Tom Stone, the person in charge of secret matters at External Affairs, walked into Igor Gouzenko’s apartment.
Constable McCulloch said years later,
“The guy said he was from the Department of External Affairs, but who was he? He didn’t show any credentials.”
First thing in the morning of Sept. 7, 1945, RCMP officers took Gouzenko and his family into protective custody and took them to RCMP headquarters, where Gouzenko was interrogated.
At the same time, the stolen documents he provided were being translated.
The secrets they held shook the Canadian government to its core.
The government discovered that the Soviet Embassy was a home to spies who were connected to Soviet spy rings in Montreal, the United States and the United Kingdom.
Through this espionage ring, secrets related to everything from cyphers to atomic bombs were being funnelled back to Moscow.
By this point, the Soviets were demanding that Gouzenko be handed over stating he was a thief and had stolen money.
Nobody was under any illusions about what would happen to Gouzenko if he was turned over to the Soviets.
He would disappear, plain and simple.
Canadian authorities stated they did not know where he was, and they sent an RCMP bulletin out to offices across the country as a ruse, asking for information if Gouzenko appeared in any of those cities.
The Soviets were not fooled.
They had a spy named Kim Philby in British intelligence.
Philby was the chief of counterintelligence at MI6, and he relayed the information to the Russians.
The USSR took no action though, not wanting to expose Philby or publicize that Gouzenko had defected.
Meanwhile the Gouzenkos were in a motel room and in each room on either side were multiple Mounties protecting the family.
For the next few weeks, there were shuttled between motels and inns, all while RCMP members followed them in unmarked vehicles.
Gouzenko was given the code name of Corby. Inspired by a box in Norman Robertson’s desk where he kept the stolen Soviet documents alongside a bottle of Corby rye whisky.
Needing to get the family to a secure and secret location, the decision was made to move them to Camp X.
Located between Whitby and Oshawa, Ontario, the decommissioned camp was where covert British and Canadian agents were trained to conduct operations in Europe during the Second World War.
Established by Sir William Stephenson on Dec. 6, 1941, the day before the Attack on Pearl Harbor, it operated until 1944.
Svetlana Gouzenko said,
“We were told we were going to a different place, but we were told that it would take several hours driving away from the Ottawa region.”
The family would live in an old farmhouse at the former camp along with several RCMP members who slept with their revolvers in case the Soviets arrived.
As can be expected, tensions were high.
One officer, John Dean said,
“It was about three o’clock in the morning and there was a noise outside my window. I got up with revolver in hand and went out through the front door and tried to sneak to the back where I heard the noise. It was a damn cow.”
While at Camp X, Gouzenko met with representatives from the RCMP, British Secret Service, MI5, MI6 and the FBI at the dining room table.
Svetlana said that sometimes there would be six or seven people who would sit around the table talking as Gouzenko answered questions about Russian activities at the embassy, things he saw and anything else he knew.
The government and RCMP did what they could to make the family comfortable.
Svetlana Gouzenko, pregnant with her second child, was given things like a sewing machine so she could make baby clothes, or new clothes for the family.
At one point she asked for a layette,
Sir William Stephenson received the request but had no idea that she was asking for clothing for a newborn.
One of his secretaries explained it to him and he then had to determine if he should send a blue or pink one, before deciding to go with a neutral white.
They also had to plan for the eventual birth of the child.
After Svetlana’s due date of Nov. 26 arrived, the RCMP had a car on standby with two Mounties ready to take her to town.
When she went into labour, RCMP officer Merv Black was given a wad of cash to pay the hospital, and he adopted the cover of a husband who spoke little English.
He took her to the hospital and answered questions in halted English. When questions got too personal, he took out the wad of cash and said, “I pay now!”
That ended the questions.
By an unbelievable chance, the nurse assisting in the delivery room was the same one who had helped deliver Svetlana’s first child in Ottawa.
The woman kept saying she resembled a woman she had known in Ottawa and Svetlana did her best to throw her off the scent.
After the baby was born, the RCMP purchased a Christmas tree, decorated the farm house and prepared a turkey dinner for everyone.
Presents were brought in to give the family a good Christmas amid a troubling time.
Amid all the festivities, the Canadian government tried to keep Gouzenko’s defection a secret, but nothing can stay hidden forever.
On Feb. 3, 1946, the story broke in the news.
But there was more to that story being released than meets the eye and it all came down to 007’s inspiration.
The intrepid, William Stephenson.
Prime Minister King was still refusing to take major action in protecting Gouzenko out of fear of angering the Soviets and starting a war.
By now King had been Prime Minister for almost twenty years. He was getting older, tired and was only four years away from his own death.
He didn’t have the energy for an international incident and told MP Jack Pickersgill,
“If we exploit this Gouzenko business we are going to be the prime targets of the Soviet Union.”
William Stephenson was not about to let Gouzenko out of his hands and things are easier to control when you were pulling the strings.
He said, “King refused to take the necessary action for fear of offending Stalin.”
Working with Ernest Cuneo, an American intelligence liaison, he had the story of Gouzenko’s defection leak through the American newspaper and radio columnist Drew Pearson.
The news flash stated,
“This is Drew Pearson with a flash from Washington. Canada’s Prime Minister Mackenzie King has informed President Truman of a very serious situation affecting our relations with Russia. A Soviet agent surrendered some time ago to Canadian authorities and confessed a gigantic Russian espionage network inside the United States.”
Now that the story was out, King had no choice but to act and he immediately informed his cabinet about Gouzenko’s defection.
Three days later, he created a Royal Commission to investigate Soviet espionage in Canada.
He wrote in his diary,
“I cannot interpret these events and how all of this has come direct to my own doorstep in any way other than in the play of world forces and unseen forces beyond that I have been somehow singled out as an instrument on the part of unseen forces to bring about the exposure that has now taken place.”
On Feb. 13, 1946, Gouzenko began to give evidence about Soviet espionage in Canada.
He named multiple individuals in the Soviet spy ring including Gordon Lunan, the speech writer for Paul Martin Sr., Israel Halperin, a mathematics professor at Queen’s University and Fred Rose, a Member of Parliament.
With that information, the RCMP had to act quickly and to do so they took advantage of the War Measures Act.
Established in 1914, the Act gave the government emergency measures that included the suspension of civil liberties and personal freedoms.
During the First World War it was used to intern anyone deemed an enemy alien, which the government considered anyone who immigrated in the previous decade from Germany or Austro-Hungary to be.
During the Second World War it was used to intern Japanese Canadians from the British Columbian coast into camps, while the government stole their homes, businesses and possessions.
With the War Measures Act still in place in Canada in early-1946, the RCMP could use it to arrest those named in the documents provided by Gouzenko.
Prime Minister King, who wasn’t too bothered about the suspension of civil liberties of Japanese Canadians during the war, was now worried. He wrote in his diary,
“I can see where a great cry will be raised having had a Commission sit in secret and men and women arrested and detained under an order in council passed really under War Measures powers. I will be held up to the world as the very opposite of a democrat. It is part of the inevitable.”
At 6 a.m. on Feb. 14, 1957, Cecil Bayfield with the RCMP gathered 44 members and informed them of their mission to drive out to the list of addresses, search the buildings and arrest the suspects in the Soviet spy ring case.
Gordon Lunan was in London but was recalled on the claim he was being promoted.
Upon landing in Montreal, he was quickly arrested.
Fred Rose was not arrested on that day over worry of public backlash for arresting an elected official without charge.
First elected in 1943 with the Labor-Progressive Party, Rose was accused of leading a ring of over 20 Soviet spies who were looking to steal information related to the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb.
After several others incriminated Rose, the decision was made to arrest him.
At 11 p.m. on March 14, while he was speaking with a Toronto Daily Star reporter on the phone, Fred Rose was arrested in his apartment.
Due to the War Measures Act suspending certain liberties, none of those arrested knew why they were now in handcuffs. Each went through severe interrogations and were held for days on end without charges.
As a quick aside… It is no secret that Prime Minister King saw himself as a Christian crusader who had a dislike for Jewish people. In 1939, he denied entry to Canada to 907 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis and caused many to return to Europe. 254 of them died in the Holocaust.
Prime Minister King believed many of those arrested in the Gouzenko incident were Jewish Communists and he saw himself on the right side of history in the story of.
He wrote,
“It is a rather extraordinary thing that most of those caught in this present net are Jews or have Jewish wives or of Jewish descent.”
Only four of those arrested were Jewish, two of whom were acquitted.
Of those arrested, 16 went through trials between 1946 and 1949, seven of whom were acquitted due to lack of evidence.
Gordon Lunan received five years, while Fred Rose was convicted and ejected from the House of Commons.
After the arrests were made, Prime Minister King finally made a public statement about the Gouzenko Affair.
But he didn’t identify the Soviet Union in his statement.
Five days after King’s statement, the Soviets stated that while certain members of their embassy did obtain secret character information the information was worthless.
Every member of the embassy implicated in Gouzenko’s documents was expelled by the Canadian government, including the man leading the Soviet ring at the embassy, Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolai Zabotin.
Upon his return to the USSR, Zabotin was sent to a Siberian labour camp where he remained until he was released in 1953.
His health broken by the gulag, he died only a few years later.
He wasn’t the only one to suffer because of Gouzenko’s defection.
Gouzenko’s mother died in a NKVD prison while under investigation by the Soviets.
Svetlana’s father, mother and sister were all sent to prison for five years, and her sister’s daughter, Tatiana, was sent to an orphanage.
Both Igor and Svetlana Gouzenko were tried in absentia in Russia and were found guilty and sentenced to death.
This meant the couple could never return to the Soviet Union.
As for Fred Rose, he was released from prison in 1951. He attempted to build a life for himself in Montreal but at each job, the RCMP told his employers and coworkers he was a convicted spy.
In 1953 he moved to Poland where he worked as a magazine editor. His Canadian citizenship was revoked in 1957, and he was unable to return to Canada to appeal the decision.
Rose died on March 16, 1983, in Warsaw.
Gouzenko became one of the most famous men in Canada, but no one really knew what he looked like as offers for his story were flooding in.
Cosmopolitan offered $5,000 for an interview, which Gouzenko turned down.
They kept coming back, offering more money, until the figure reached $50,000, which Gouzenko accepted in November 1946.
He also received $75,000 for the film rights to his story from 20th Century Fox.
That movie was turned into The Iron Curtain starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews.
Filmed in Ottawa, Soviet sympathisers attempted to disrupt filming at various locations.
The film proved to be a financial hit, earning $2 million at the box office.
Prime Minister King had also changed how he saw Gouzenko and agreed to meet with him and stated he was quote,
“very pleased at the way in which he had conducted himself throughout the period of great anxiety. I appreciated his manliness, his courage and standing for right.”
King offered Gouzenko a pension of $400 a month, or nearly $7,000 today.
Gouzenko turned it down, believing he had more than enough money from Cosmopolitan and film deals.
He fully expected more to come.
Svetlana Gouzenko said,
“RCMP Assistant Commissioner Nicholson just gasped and flopped on the chair, surprised that this stupid young man refused a government pension.”
For Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, the long-term ramifications of the Gouzenko Affair continued for years.
Gone was the belief that the Soviets were allies, replaced with a suspicion that would dominate the next four decades as the Cold War began.
The Red Scare of the 1950s, which often ruined innocent lives in the process, traces its origins back to the Gouzenko Affair.
Would the Cold War and Red Scare have happened without Gouzenko?
Almost certainly. But there is no question he helped usher in that era with his defection.
But what about Gouzenko? After he shook the diplomatic world to its core…what happened to him?
Igor and Svetlana were given Canadian citizenship and new identities.
Together they raised eight children and lived in Port Credit, Ontario.
For the rest of his life, Gouzenko feared he would wake up one day with a gun pointed at him by a Soviet operative.
But that day never came.
The Soviets made no attempt to kill Gouzenko, and according to those close to Stalin, he forbade anyone from going after Gouzenko for fear of upsetting the West.
Nonetheless, he was always convinced that the RCMP assigned to protect him, as late as the 1960s, had been infiltrated by the KGB.
Gouzenko and his wife settled into a normal suburban existence, and their children knew nothing of their Soviet background.
They assumed their parents were Czech and even cheered for Czechoslovakia in the Olympics and hockey games.
It was not until they were in their late teens that they learned the truth.
In 1948, Gouzenko published This Was My Choice, a book about his defection.
This was followed by The Fall of a Titan, a novel about life under Stalin.
That book won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 1954. It was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Throughout his life, whenever he made public appearances, Gouzenko always wore a hood to protect his identity.
In 1958, he appeared on the panel show Front Page Challenge, wearing that trademark hood and with his voice disguised by technicians.
On June 25, 1982, Gouzenko died of a heart attack in Mississauga.
Svetlana died in 2001 and is buried next to her husband.
Today, two plaques commemorate the defection of Gouzenko, located in Dundonald Park in Ottawa, across from where he and his family lived in an apartment prior to making the decision that changed the world.
In 2002, then Federal Heritage Minister Sheila Copps designed The Gouzenko Affair as an event of national historic significance.
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