All the Kremlin’s Men

Seventy-five years ago, three days after Japan formally surrendered, bringing the Second World War to a close, Igor Gouzenko vanished from the Soviet embassy on Charlotte Street in Ottawa’s tranquil Sandy Hill neighbourhood. Over the next forty-eight hours, something of a legend was born. The details and chronology differ depending on the teller, but most agree that Gouzenko, who had been in the city since 1943, first headed to the Ottawa Journal. The twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk had secrets to share. But then his courage failed him and he went home.

Gouzenko, who had learned days before that he was to be shipped back to the Soviet Union, was frantic and afraid. He had stolen scores of top secret documents and worried that as soon as the embassy’s military attaché, Nikolai Zabotin, discovered the missing papers, he’d be ambushed and punished.

When he arrived home, at 511 Somerset Street West, a strange-looking two-storey affair with round...