Igor Gouzenko defeated 80 years ago. His cold brave of war has not been forgotten

For 20 years, the tomb of a former Soviet figure employee whose defection revealed a secret spy ring in Canada was not marked in a cemetery in Mississauga, Ontario.

Left without tombstone in the middle of the persistent fears of reprisals of Moscow, the tomb of Igor Gouzenko and his wife Svetlana has been identified since 2002 by a large rockkoka rock carrying a plaque with their names and the sentence “We chose freedom for humanity”.

A small rally at the grave this weekend marked 80 years since Gouzenko defected the Soviet Union, Conversance of 109 secret documents In his shirt outside the Ottawa Embassy and delivering them to the offices of the newspaper Ottawa in 1945.

Nicknamed the Gouzenko affair, the defection is considered by some historians as the start of the Cold War.

Speaking almost a century later from the Springcreek cemetery in Mississauga, Gouzenko’s daughter, Evy Wilson, said her parents had acted “spontaneously” with a single goal in mind.

“They wanted to warn the West,” said Wilson. “That’s all. Complete judgment. They had no other mission other than warning the West that the Soviets had nuclear weapons, had the atomic bomb.”

The commemoration of the defection, she said, is particularly important in the present moment, while the tensions between Western democracies and Russia evolve in the midst of the Ukraine War.

Secret documents have revealed a spying ring

The same year as the defection of Gouzenko, Hitler’s fascist forces had been defeated during the Second World War and the atomic bombs had been abandoned on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

September 5, 1945, Gouzenko Made with revealing documents The fact that a Soviet spying ring operating in Canada has penetrated the main government services, the Canadian army and a laboratory with access to the secrets of the bomb.

“They had a unique window on the primary mission, which was the development of the atomic bomb,” said Wilson, born in 1946 near Oshawa, Ontario, at Camp X, the first spy training center specially designed in North America.

“It was one of their main missions to this embassy in particular in the Soviet system. The Ottawa Embassy was the key to transmitting the data.”

The extent of Soviet espionage revealed in stolen documents has aroused significant concern in power rooms in Western democracies.

Gouzenko worried reprisals for the rest of his life, living anonymously in a suburb west of Toronto and carrying a bag above his head during television appearances.

A bronze plaque commemorating Gouzenko was erected in the Dundonald park in Ottawa in 2004, opposite the Brown Brick building on Somerset Street where he lived with his wife and baby before his defection.

Gouzenko died in 1982, but the tombstone bearing his name was only erected after his wife was buried next to him in 2001.

Soviet “not the allies” thought

Don Mahar attended the ceremony on Saturday in Mississauga.

In 1976, Mahar moved from Saskatchewan to Ottawa to work with the RCMP security service. One of his first responsibilities was to manage the Gouzenko file.

For Mahar, who continued to work on a counterattack for the rest of his career, the birthday has the personal meaning of “closing the circle” of his young gendarme time until today.

But he said that the date was also an opportunity to recognize the role of Gouzenko in the ignition of the Soviet threat to the West in the era of the Cold War.

“The Soviets actually put spying against us all, and they were not the allies that we thought we were,” said Mahar. “It has continued to date.”

For Wilson, the birthday can help to illuminate this story.

“Today, everyone has nuclear weapons, and we are in the precipice of a Second World War in the most disastrous conditions,” said Wilson.

“My parents, until the day of their death, they both thought they had made the right choice.”