How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

The misleading title is this book’s most serious flaw. Surely the Cold
War began in March 1918 with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, when Lenin’s
newly installed government withdrew Soviet troops from World War I and
left the German Empire free to concentrate its forces against the
Western Front. Mistrust, even hostility, between Western and Soviet
governments continued throughout the interwar period and World War II.
After Hitler’s death, Western–Soviet antagonism returned to normal.
The Gouzenko Affair was a symptom of the Cold War rather than a cause.

Yet such authorities as Margaret Macmillan and Reg Whitaker rightly
give this book ringing endorsements. Knight’s writing style is clear
and exciting. She has benefited from Canadian, British, and Soviet
sources that were not available to earlier writers and has made
extensive use of U.S. sources. Much of the information is
familiar—Mackenzie King’s eccentricities, the disclosure of spies by
name across North America and the United Kingdom, Gouzenko’s
imperfections—but she raises questions from a post–9/11 perspective:
How guilty were the supposed spies? Was the reaction excessive in terms
of human rights violations? Did the Gouzenko Affair make the Soviet
Union appear a worse threat than it really was? Knight answers the
second and third questions in the affirmative. She reveals that
Gouzenko’s post-defection name was Stanley Krysac, tells where he
lived, and reports that

he shocked his eight grown children with the news that they were of
Russian—not Czech—extraction.

This is Knight’s fifth book on intelligence-related matters. A former
journalist with The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The New York
Review of Books, and The Washington Post, she has also been a fellow at
Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Institute. She describes real people with
real problems in gripping detail. The pressures on everyone become
obvious, and the seemingly bizarre behaviour of many of the characters
becomes explicable.

Knight relates the involvement of British, Canadian, Soviet, and U.S.
officials in the Gouzenko Affair. If one had time to read only a single
book that deals with the topic, this would certainly be the best choice.