Igor Gouzenko and the Start of the Cold War

By Daniel German

The “hot war” that was the Second World War officially ended on September 2, 1945, with the surrender of Japan. Three days later, on the evening of September 5, the Cold War—or at least public knowledge of what would come to be known as the Cold War—began. On that day, a junior officer at the Embassy of the Soviet Union in Ottawa, carrying assorted documents he had removed from the embassy, attempted to defect to Canada.

The man in question, Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko, was more than simply a junior diplomat: he was actually a member of the Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye (GRU), the Soviet military’s foreign military-intelligence agency. His main duties as part of the Soviet legation in Ottawa included encrypting and decrypting messages for the GRU head in Ottawa, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, who, under the guise of being the Soviet military attaché, operated a string of…