GROWING UP GOUZENKO
Evy Wilson, the eldest daughter of the Cold War defector, tells her strange coming-of-age story.
IN 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Evy Wilson’s mother told her the truth. It stunned her. Gossip about spies, bizarre incidents and hyper-vigilance had enveloped her family for years. Evy had often wondered about the real story, but this was light years away from anything she imagined.
Finally, all the fragments began to make sense.
Her mother said that not long before Evy was born, she and her father made a difficult and dangerous decision: They escaped a brutal totalitarian regime to warn the West of the existence of a Soviet atomic spy ring.
Her mother emphasized that to keep her family safe Evy must never tell anyone. Safety lay in secrecy. Evy had just turned 16 and the revelation shattered the frame of her existence. Her father, she learned, was the cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa whose defection in 1945 with vital Soviet documents had helped to catapult the world into the Cold War. Her father was Igor Gouzenko. Evy’s parents had always tried to come up with explanations for the oddness that plagued their lives.
There were strange incidents, and while some of the more trivial events were easy to shrug off or explain away, others were not.
Like the day they found their mailbox mangled from an explosion. For the children, the “bombing” was passed off as a random prank, but that night Evy remembers a tense, hushed conversation between her parents in “Czech,” a language the children didn’t understand and was really Russian.
Her parents were also excessively vigilant about their children’s whereabouts. Once, when Evy skipped school with a friend, a search was launched that bordered on the frantic. Later, safely back home, Evy faced a stormy reprimand and stern warnings about the risks of kidnapping. The underlying message: we must always be watchful!
In 1950s Canada, Evy’s home life in Port Credit, on the western edge of Toronto, was nothing like the Dick and Jane world that surrounded her. In a largely homogeneous city where pizza was still considered exotic and everyone spoke English, her parents’ heavy accents and different lifestyle stood out.
Her parents claimed to be Czechoslovakian, then an East Bloc country under Soviet control, and gossip circulated that they were spies. School friends avoided coming to her home and her parents’ accents were mocked. It was a world in the grips of the Cold War.
Nonetheless, to a casual observer in 1962 Evy would have seemed a fairly typical Canadian teenager. By Grade 11, she was excelling in school. She sat on the student council, she was a cheerleader and a prefect, and chaired the Girls Athletic Association and the school decorating committee.
Unlike at primary school, where she had struggled academically, Evy found success in high school. She overcame a speech disability and she was well liked. In a home where she was the second eldest of eight children — and the oldest daughter — she was expected to help care for her younger siblings, five of whom were under six. High school was a refuge and the abundance of extra curricular school activities filled a social void. Fascinating subjects and amazing teachers made the days fly by.
At the same time, Evy began to distance herself from her parents. Their accents, the relentless speculation about their backgrounds and their culture of caution was so different from the laid back casualness of her friends. She found it embarrassing.
By the time she was 17, she’d fled the turbulence and the strangeness and got married and given birth to her first child. As the child of parents who had been placed in Canada’s first and awkwardly managed witness protection program, Evy eagerly embraced her married name. (The family was supplied with a new name by the federal government, but Evy still prefers to retain privacy regarding her family’s protected name.)
Looking back, she describes the transition to her new identity simply: “I was fortunate. I married young into the Wilson family, and I blended. I was a Wilson now. And all our children would be Wilsons. Even my husband didn’t know my family’s real background when we married.”
Today, more than 50 years later and now in her mid-60s, Evy looks remarkably like her mother at the same age. She has the same build, the same rounded cheekbones, alert blue eyes, and soft, slightly curling blond-brown hair.
Evy, short for Evelyn, was born in early December 1945 at the legendary Camp X, the secret Second World War training installation located between Oshawa and Whitby on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
Immediately after her birth, Evy and her mother were taken to Oshawa General Hospital where they stayed for almost two weeks under a protected identity. At the time, her father was not allowed to leave the protection of Camp X, so Mervyn Black, an undercover RCMP officer who spoke Russian and could interpret for her mother, posed as her husband using a false European name.
Like her parents and older brother, Evy was not issued ID of any kind, not even a birth certificate. Two years later, when they moved from Camp X, her parents and their two children were given a Czech cover surname and fabricated family history.
Then a family of four, they settled in their own home in Port Credit with an RCMP officer living with them as a “boarder.” Later, when the RCMP decided to terminate security, Gouzenko extended the protection for a number of years using his own money.
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To this day, Igor Gouzenko defies easy classification. His life was full of roles: husband, father, defector, soldier of freedom, artist, author, legend.
From the night in September 1945 when he slipped out of the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa carrying 109 documents detailing Soviet atomic espionage activities in the West, his world became a kaleidoscope of Cold War intrigue, conjecture, misunderstanding, challenge, even triumph. Eventually, he was able to write his story from his own unique perspective, became the subject of a Hollywood movie and was studied by an untold number of government bureaucrats, historians and journalists.
It was a life dramatically altered by a single momentous decision, and it is a story still unfolding.
It’s no exaggeration to say Gouzenko played a pivotal role in triggering the Cold War. The documents he hid under his shirt that night in 1945 led to a cataclysmic shift in international relations. Although anti-Communist sentiment was already on the rise, the West still considered the Soviet Union an ally in the aftermath of the war against Nazi Germany, and the revelation that the Soviets were spying on their friends, infiltrating key government offices and appropriating atomic secrets shocked North Americans.
Gouzenko “awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage,” The New York Times said in 1954.
In 1946, Canada’s Royal Commission Report on Espionage was equally unequivocal about the value of Gouzenko’s decision: “Gouzenko, by what he has done, has rendered great public service to the people of this country and thereby has placed Canada in his debt.”
Over the years, however, those positive views of Gouzenko were eroded.
His motivation was questioned; there were inferences he’d defected so he could continue to enjoy the good life in Canada rather than returning to the austerity of the Soviet Union — and that perhaps he hoped for a significant financial benefit for turning over the files.
Evy firmly maintains neither is true, and believes such talk was propaganda circulated by the Soviets to discredit him as a defector.
“The Soviets were relentless in their retaliation,” she says. “One of their techniques, well documented today, is character assassination of rivals and defectors. The process worked well to undermine the credibility of their opponents. Records will show that there has never been a financial benefit for my parents. Quite the opposite.”
What compelled her parents to risk their lives, and leave behind family and friends and secure careers in the Soviet Union, she believes, was the horrifying reality of the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
“Nuclear weapons in the hands of a Soviet dictator was unthinkable,” she says. “My parents agreed that something had to be done — and swiftly. The West had to be warned.”
Nonetheless, the Soviets detonated their first A-bomb in a 1948 test, triggering a multibillion-dollar arms race that raged for decades.
Following his defection, the Soviets declared Gouzenko a dangerous traitor. He was sentenced to death in absentia, a punishment the KGB, who hunted him for years, was prepared to carry out abroad, a reality that meant there could be no contact with family in the Soviet Union.
Over the years, though, family news trickled out of the Soviet Union from time to time. In the late 1980s, they learned Igor’s mother had died during interrogation, and that Svetlana’s sister and parents had been arrested, incarcerated for five years and then exiled to Siberia. Unlike millions of other Soviets, they escaped death in a gulag prison camp and managed to build a new life in Siberia. The fate of the rest of her father’s family remains unclear.
“Our families never knew what happened in Canada,” says Evy. “They were isolated from one another, they were interrogated, and they were told lies. In the early 1990s we received a last communiqué about them. Since then — nothing.”
Gouzenko died in 1982 at 63 and was quietly buried in Mississauga. His grave remained unmarked for years, as did Svetlana’s, who died in 2001.
In September 2002, a gravestone inscribed with their original name was unveiled in the cemetery in Mississauga.
Family, friends, national and international media and government representatives attended the ceremony and gave eulogies. Among those who attended was the late Laurier LaPierre, who had interviewed Gouzenko in 1966 on the landmark CBCTV public affairs program This Hour has Seven Days.
The shadow of fear and secrecy that had so sharply defined the lives of the Gouzenkos began to lift with the fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War in 1990.
Before she died, Svetlana gave a few candid interviews to the media and historians, hoping, she said, to dispel “the negative stereotype, lies and slander” that had often dogged her husband throughout his life.
In 2004, a landmark conference in Ottawa hosted by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada highlighted the international research still underway about the effects of Gouzenko’s defection in both the West and the Soviet Union. The conference, spurred by the determination of Ottawa native Andrew Kavchak to acknowledge Gouzenko’s contributions, featured Canadian, American and British scholars.
Following the conference, a bronze plaque honouring Gouzenko was unveiled in Dundonald Park on Somerset Street, across the road from the apartment where the Gouzenkos lived until the defection and next to a plaque erected by the City of Ottawa a year before.
After living most of her life in obscurity and silence, Evy Wilson has also begun to speak about her parents and her adolescence.
“I grew up thinking we were Czechoslovakian, a people strongly opposed to totalitarian regimes,” she says. “We cheered for the Czech hockey team when they played against the U.S.S.R. And later on, like everyone around us, we mourned President Kennedy’s death.”
Although the Cold War wasn’t a regular topic in the Gouzenko home, the family listened to Kennedy’s famous 1963 speech promising not to abandon the people of West Berlin, and they admired his stand against the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Once she learned about her father’s defection, the knowledge that she was somehow “connected to the enemy” was a painful secret to carry around. It would be many years before Evy felt the desire to connect the wandering dots of her childhood.
“As children we were only somewhat aware how dramatically the slanders and libels were affecting our lives,” she says. “Nor did we know that much of it was Soviet inspired. During the Cold War there was so much misinformation written about my parents and their role in the unfolding events. I can only make an educated guess about how many people knew who we were back then but it seems we were surrounded by those who knew.”
Marriage and a baby had propelled Evy into an entirely different family life and she took comfort there, finding some “relief from the silent suffering of secrecy” and the frustration of not being free to retort and fight back against the negative interpretations.
She eventually went to the University of Toronto, obtained a B.Sc. in physics and enjoyed a successful career as a meteorologist.
“With the end of the Cold War, things changed dramatically,” Evy says. “Working closely with my mother after my father died, and throughout our many trials, I discovered my mother’s immense strength and inner beauty.”
Together, the two began to adjust and take ownership of the lens through which the public viewed the Gouzenkos, work she describes as “a monumentally challenging and ultimately rewarding task.”
What impresses her still is the bravery shown by her parents who, aware of the dangers, decided together to escape to the West carrying Soviet secrets.
“Knowing the extent of Soviet infiltration, my father did not expect to live, and he planned accordingly,” Evy says. “I understand now how many sacrifices they made — painful permanent separation from their families, huge cultural and language barriers, setbacks in what had been successful careers, the inordinate challenge of raising children surrounded in secrecy, and living each day in constant watchfulness and uncertainty.”
Many defectors did not escape Soviet retribution. Although the Gouzenkos had initially received protection from the RCMP, witness protection for Soviet defectors was an alien activity for the Mounties that created a strained relationship.
Today, Evy believes that given the circumstances, most of the officers assigned to the family were “outstanding,” a fact few publications about the Gouzenkos have acknowledged. Although there was dissent within the ranks regarding the family, Evy says that it can be easily attributed to the suspicions raised everywhere in the West by embedded Soviet agents such as Kim Philby, a double agent in British intelligence.
“My father and mother never expressed uncertainty,” Evy says. “Not once did they say they had misgivings about their decision. They remained steadfast even with all the challenges they faced ... They felt it was worth it.
“They believed the evidence they delivered to the West would prevent the Soviets from developing a deadly nuclear arsenal. And they believed it would help put an end to Stalin’s rule and internal persecution.”
Although figures vary, the evidence Gouzenko provided led to the arrest of at least 39 spy suspects. Among the 18 who were eventually convicted were Fred Rose, a high profile Canadian Communist MP, Sam Carr, the national organizer of the Canadian Communist Party, and scientist Raymond Boyer.
Gouzenko’s revelation also blazed a trail that eventually led to the activities of spies like Philby and Klaus Fuchs, a theoretical physicist who was convicted in 1950 of passing on American A-bomb information to the Soviets. It was a complicated saga that would thrust the world into a new era of global relationships and security intelligence.
Last year marked the 30th anniversary of Igor Gouzenko’s death and the 11th of Svetlana’s. Evy has retired from her career in atmospheric sciences and runs a bed and breakfast business in a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario.
She also curates a large family archives that covers a critical chapter of Cold War history, a collection made up of original manuscripts, original works of art and reproductions, original art by her father and mother, Cold War books and articles, a library reflecting her parents’ wide range of interests, artifacts, original films and photos; and original diary notes, memoirs and documents.
Taken as a whole, the contents detail an intimate family history that, Evy believes, eradicates many of the misconceptions that have permeated the lives of the Gouzenkos.
Among other things, the archives reveals that the family’s financial security was largely due to her father’s endeavours — the books he wrote (including Fall of a Titan, a Governor General’s Award winner for fiction in 1954), the Hollywood movie based on his life (The Iron Curtain, 1948) and the proceeds from the sale of his own paintings. Over the years, her mother’s entrepreneurial spirit, largely in real estate, also contributed to the family’s well-being.
Evy hopes one day to publish her parents’ memoirs and exhibit their artwork and original manuscripts.
“My father and mother were outstanding parents. To fully understand ... I had to grow through my own experiences. I am very proud of my heritage. To the day they died both my parents believed they had made the right choice in warning the West. Each retained a love of Canada that made their decision possible.
“‘Being a ‘Gouzenko’ means believing in freedom — despite the cost.”