COLD WAR:Igor Gouzenko 

COLD WAR:Igor Gouzenko

Igor Gouzenko was born in Moscow in the year 1919. He studied at Moscow Architectural Institute. He met his wife Ann, who he married after some time. Igor joined the military at the start of world war two as a clerk. This position in the military gave him the chance to study the Soviet espionage activities. World war 2 was a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The battle was based on both ideological and geopolitical struggle, which was expressed via indirect means such as psychological warfare, propaganda campaigns, and technological competitions. Since Igor new the secrets of the Soviet Union, I think he started the cold war.

In 1945 Igor Gouzenko was taken from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa and swept off a Soviet spy-ring, which infiltrated the Canadian government (Niergarth, 2018). Only after three days of the Japanese’s surrender and the Second World War ended. The intelligence network has since expanded to the United States and the UK. The first revealed and captured atomic bomb hackers is included. In the essence and magnitude of Stalin’s clandestine acts against them, Igor Gouzenko’s defection shakes up western allies. The implications have been drastic and have, for decades, influenced global security and foreign affairs. Although the “Gouzenko Case” was the first major international Cold War incident in the post-war era, there was no known landmark in the Canadian capital for over 50 years to identify the individual or incidents. In 1999, Andrew Kavchak, an Ottawa-based and amateur historian, asked the local and federal governments to recognize the defection of Igor Gouzenko as an incident of historical significance. While the Mayor of Ottawa immediately supported the idea, many years preceded by institutional and political convulsions and contortions, including unexpected defeats and efforts by some officials to circumvent this effort. Persistence, courage, and joy flourished at long last. The Federal Historical Minister recognized the’ Gouzenko Affair’ formally in 2002 as a case of national historic significance.

Upon hearing that he and his father were to be sent back to the Soviet Union, they were not happy with his homeland’s standard of life and government; he agreed to flee in September 1945. Gouzenko came out of the embassy door with a small box of books of Soviet code and information to decode. He first went to RCMP, but the officials of the RCMP department declined to accept his claim. He went to the newspaper Ottawa Journal then, but the night editor was not involved in the paper and proposed he go to the Justice Department, but when he got there, nobody was on duty. Upon realizing his duplicity, the Soviet citizens became frightened, he went back to his apartment and hid his family across the door for the night. Protected by a friend, Gouzenko was observing a squad of Soviet agents bust up into his apartment through the keyhole. They continued to search his belongings and left only when the Ottawa police questioned them (Molinaro, 2017).

In February 1946, there spread the news that the Soviet government had been passed over by a network of Canadian spies under the control of the Soviet Union (Molinaro, 2017). A lot of the information taken back is now public knowledge necessary for the government of Canada to be less concerned with the data stolen. Still, more about the potential for the future to be secretly handed over. In the early studies, Canada and Gouzenko played an essential role in the nuclear bombing development, and the postwar Manhattan project Canada and were both parts of the United Kingdom. That kind of vital information could be detrimental to Canadian ambitions, which they had been providing individual nations. This warned many in the world, including the United States and the United Kingdom, who almost probably Soviet agents had often invaded their nations.

Gouzenko presented several primary clues that significantly led in Britain and North America to the continuing inquiries of a spy. Numerous Canadians who spied for the Soviet Union were revealed in the papers he turned up (Clément, 2018). For espionage, a worker of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, a Colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, and a radar technician served on the National Research Council. The FBI tracked down Soviet spy Ignacy Witczak at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Life in Canada was also linked to a spy ring of up to 20 people passing information on to the Soviets headed by Communist Party MP Fred Rose.

Out of fear of Soviet reprisals, Gouzenko and his family received another Canadian identity. Little is known of his life afterward, although it is believed that he and his wife had settled down into a middle-class life on the outskirts of Clarkson, the area of Toronto. Eight children were brought up together. He wrote many books in which he described himself as the person who intensified the coldwar2. In my view, Gouzenko, through stealing the documents of the Soviet people, started the cold war.

References

Clément, D. (2018). Canada’s integration into global intelligence-sharing networks: from Gouzenko to the Montreal Olympics. Intelligence and National Security, 33(7), 1053-1069.

Molinaro, D. (2017). How the Cold War Began… with British Help: The Gouzenko Affair Revisited. Labour/Le Travail, 143-155.

Niergarth, K. (2018). Propaganda and Persuasion: The Cold War and the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society by Jennifer Anderson. Labour/Le Travail, 81, 281-284.