Remembering Gouzenko: The Struggle to Honour a Cold War Hero

On September 5, 1945, just three days after the Japanese surrendered and WWII ended, Igor Gouzenko walked out of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa and blew the lid off a Soviet spy ring that had penetrated the Canadian government. The espionage network also extended to the U.S. and the U.K. and included the first of the atom bomb spies to be exposed and caught. Igor Gouzenko’s defection woke up the Western allies to the nature and extent of Stalin’s covert activities against them. The repercussions were dramatic and affected national security and international relations for decades. Although the “Gouzenko Affair” was the first significant international incident of the post-war “Cold War”, for over fifty years there was no public marker to commemorate the person or the events that took place in Canada’s capital. In 1999, Andrew Kavchak, an Ottawa resident and amateur historian, applied to the municipal and federal governments to recognize Igor Gouzenko’s defection as an event of historic importance and honour his legacy by unveiling of historic plaques in a park in downtown Ottawa. Despite the initial receptivity to the proposal by the Mayor of Ottawa, what followed were several years of bureaucratic and political convulsions and contortions where steps forward were matched by unexpected setbacks and attempts by some bureaucrats to thwart the initiative. Persistence, patience, and good luck eventually prevailed. A milestone was achieved when the federal Minister of Heritage officially declared in 2002 the “Gouzenko Affair” to be an event of national historic significance. This was followed by the unveiling of the City of Ottawa plaque in 2003 and the federal plaque in 2004. Early in the process Kavchak managed to contact the family of his hero and share with them the joy and frustration as the applications wound their way through the “systems”. Remembering Gouzenko reveals the extent to which the history of the “Gouzenko Affair” still casts a long shadow and spurs timid authorities throughout Ottawa to suppress any eff