"Left without a headstone amid lingering fears of retribution from Moscow, the gravesite of Igor Gouzenko and his wife Svetlana has been identified since 2002 by a large Muskoka rock bearing a plaque with their names and the phrase "We chose freedom for mankind." A small gathering at the grave this weekend marked 80 years since Gouzenko defected from the Soviet Union, smuggling 109 secret documents in his shirt out of the Ottawa embassy and delivering them to the offices of the Ottawa Journal newspaper."
"Speaking nearly 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," Wilson said. "That's it. Full stop. They had no other mission other than warning the West that the Soviets had the nuclear weapon, had the atomic bomb." Commemorating the defection, she said, is particularly significant in the present moment, as tensions between Western democracies and Russia flare amid the Ukraine War."
Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk, defected in 1945 carrying 109 secret documents that exposed a Soviet spy ring in Canada. The documents showed penetration of key government departments, the Canadian military and a laboratory with access to atomic-bomb secrets. The Gouzenko Affair helped mark the start of Cold War tensions. Gouzenko and his wife Svetlana were buried in Mississauga; their gravesite remained unmarked for 20 years and has been identified since 2002 by a large Muskoka rock with a plaque. Family members marked the 80th anniversary and emphasized the couple's goal to warn the West about Soviet nuclear capabilities amid current Russia-West tensions.
Read at www.cbc.ca
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