He will never understand these Canadians, Igor Gouzenko thought to himself: great strategists, brave on the battlefield, loyal comrades, always there when needed, but incredibly naive when it came to trust. How else could he explain the way he had been treated first by the reporter at the newspaper and after, at the police station, where they thought he was a crazy drunk off the street.
The fall Ottawa weather was cool, but Igor Gouzenko was not trembling because of the bite of the wind. He was sick with apprehension because he knew that when dawn broke, his employer would kill him, his wife, and two children, for what he had done.
It was 1945, World War II was over, and the victorious allies (the USA, Great Britain and the USSR) could relax because the organization, the UN, they had created would guarantee world-wide peace.
Or so they thought.
On September 5, 1945, Igor Gouzenko, the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa decided to defect and walked out of the Embassy with 109 highly classified documents containing detailed information about the spy rings operated in Canada, the US and the United Kingdom by the USSR.
He approached a journalist at the Ottawa Journal first then the Ottawa Citizen. No luck. He hid his family at a neighbour and went to the Metropolitan Police. No reaction. Then he went to the RCMP. They started watching his apartment and when they saw that the Russians came looking for the missing documents, they took the entire Gouzenko family into immediate protective custody.
Only after these attempts did Canadian authorities fully engage with him – leading to the exposure of Soviet spy networks and the beginning of what many consider the first major incident of the Cold War. The Gouzenko Affair symbolized the crumbling of the wartime alliance between East and West, and the emergence of a new era of global conflict. In Canada, the defection had far more immediate consequences. The federal government invoked wartime powers to detain, interrogate, and prosecute several suspected communist spies. Habeas corpus was suspended, and people were arrested and questioned by the police for weeks. Denied access to legal counsel, they were held in tiny cells, kept under suicide watch, and guarded at all times. Even those who were acquitted at trial lost their reputations due to the stigma of being associated with treason. The proceedings of the espionage commission that was established to investigate the suspects rank alongside the October Crisis of 1970 as the most extensive abuse of individual rights in Canadian history during peacetime.
Well, faced with the conniving, black-hearted, cynical, murderous treachery of Russians at that time, and even worse now, how would you expect a democracy like Canada to act? You wrote it yourself; there was an West/East alliance which defeated fascism. We were brothers in arms, but that only camouflaged the deeply-rooted deceit and twisted mentality of Soviet Russia espionage services, lead by a psychopathic paranoiac who saw threats from every corner. It is regretful that those who were innocent were caught up in the net that had been thrown in a moment of panic, over the entire scene. But those innocent people had recourse to justice, they had free courts which handed down impartial verdicts – something that was never available in the Soviet Union. And putting those innocent people in the same category as the smart-ass bourgeoisie in Quebec, who loved to flirt with radicals and brag about it during their 5 a 7s, and who were brought in under the WMA for a little chat about their sympathies, seems fanciful to me. But what do I know?