The Gouzenko Affair is one of Canada’s most well-known civil rights-related events, and has been credited as a triggering factor for the Cold War.
Igor Gouzenko was born in 1919 in a village not far from Moscow. At the beginning of World War II, Gouzenko joined the military service and trained as a cipher clerk. In 1943, he was stationed in Ottawa, Canada, given the task of deciphering incoming messages and enciphering outgoing messages for the GRU. His position gave him access to Soviet espionage activities around the globe, especially in the West.
In 1945, after hearing that he and his family were to be sent home to the Soviet Union, Gouzenko – clearly happier with the quality of life and politics in Canada rather than in his homeland – decided to defect. He did so with 109 documents documenting the Soviet’s espionage activities in the West.
Though he didn’t want to get involved for fearing of escalating tensions between the Soviets and Canada, the then Prime Minister Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission in order to investigate espionage in Canada.
The results of that investigation? Gouzenko proved that there was, in fact, a very active Russian spy ring in Canada, and the investigation exposed Joseph Stalin’s efforts to steal nuclear secrets from the government, using the then-unknown technique of planting sleeper agents. The evidence that Gouzenko provided led to the arrest of 39 suspects, of whom 18 were eventually convicted, some of the more notable ones being Fred Rose, the member of Parliament in the Canadian House of Commons, Sam Carr, the Communist Party’s national organizer, and scientist Raymond Boyer.
For fear of retribution from the Soviets – who indeed wanted to find him to “keep him quiet”, Gouzenko had to wear a “bag-like” thing over his head to protect his anonymity. He and his family were secretly relocated, and had their identities changed.
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