MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
T HAVE been reading this week the Blue Book published in 1 Ottawa upon the Gouzenko revelations. It is a curious story. Igor Gouzenko, a young Lieutenant in the Red Army, was in June, 1943, appointed cypher clerk to Colonel Zabotin, the Russian Military Attaché in Ottawa. On reaching Canada with his wife and baby he was affected by the atmosphere of freedom which prevailed. The stories which he had been told at Moscow about the wickedness of the capitalist West appeared to him to be untrue stories. He was much impressed by the fact that there were consumer goods in the shop-windows which everyone was entitled to purchase. He was astonished to observe that in Canada the elections were not marred by any intimidation and that, in place of the single party list, there were candidates openly avowing their allegiance to opposition parties, for whom, if one so desired, one could vote without fear of molesta- tion or reprisals. He came to realise that the liberty of the individual was something more than a delusive slogan invented by the bourgeoisie, but that it did in fact represent a habit of life. The citizen of Canada was not regarded as a mere cog in the vast State machine, but was respected as a human being having the right to his own development and even eccentricity. In place of the grim monotone, the sombre orthodoxy, of the Marxist religion, here was every variety of voice and shape and colour. Above all perhaps he witnessed the privileges which accrue to those who are members of a free nation. Not merely that basic privilege, which to us seems as natural as the air we breathe, namely that no man can be con- demned without trial ; but the wider privilege of being able to speak as one desires and to exchange ideas with one's friends without fear of delation or betrayal. Igor Gouzenko was much affected by all this.
* * * It would be a fascinating psychological study to examine the stages by which, during those two years between June, 1943, and September, 1945, Igor Gouzenko passed from a vague awareness of democratic theory, through an increasing sympathy for that theory, until finally he was driven to repudiate the Soviet system. He stated in his evidence that he was shocked by the realisation that, whereas the Canadian people were generously sending supplies and collecting money for the Soviet Union, the office to which he was attached in the Russian Embassy was devoting its whole energies to espionage directed against Canada. We may well believe that during those twenty-seven months Gouzenko and his wife must have endured many acute conflicts of conscience and loyalty. The climax was reached in August, 1945, when Gouzenko and his family received orders to return immediately to Russia. On the night of September 5th he escaped from the Embassy carrying with him a sample of incriminating documents which he had extracted from the files. On the following day he visited several offices and newspapers and showed them the documents ; he was not taken seriously. When he returned to his flat that evening he observed that it was being watched by agents of the Russian Embassy. He therefore took refuge in the adjoining flat which was leased by a non-commissioned officer in the R.C.A.F. The latter, on his own initiative, went off on his bicycle for police assistance. Shortly afterwards four men from the Russian Embassy arrived and broke into Gouzenko's apartment where they were discovered by the police ransacking the cupboards. On the following day Gouzenko was taken to the office of the Canadian Mounted Police where he handed over his documents and asked to be placed under protective custody. It was in this manner that the ramifications of the Russian espionage system in Canada came to be disclosed.
* * * * The Blue Book which I have been reading is the report of the Royal Commission under Judge Taschereau and Judge Kellock which was thereafter appointed by Order in Council to investigate these revelations. It is an enormous volume and contains short-hand notes of the evidence taken from those who were inculpated. To the Canadian and American publics it came as a sudden shock to dis- cover that members of a foreign mission, enjoying diplomatic
immunity, should seek to, obtain from Canadian citizens information upon secret military matters. The righteous horror which was ex- pressed appears to me somewhat exaggerated. It is the duty of service attaches to obtain all the information that they can, and it has for generations been the practice of some countries to employ means which are neither avowable nor scrupulous. In the long history of the old diplomacy revelations and scandals of this sort, have often occurred. In the present case it was made quite clear that the Ambassador himself was in no way responsible ; he had no knowledge of, and no control over, the activities of his service attaches. That also is a quite customary division of responsibilities. The Gouzenko revelations do not, in themselves, disclose some un- heard-of violation of international practice ; their significance is to be sought rather in the light which they throw upon Soviet organisa- tion and methods. Nor is it either sensible or fair to jump to the conclusion that these activities imply a desire on the part of the Russian Government to prepare for a third war ; it is the recognised business of all intelligence services to obtain all the information they can about the defences and armament of the countries in which they operate. There is nothing sinister in that. What differentiates Russian methods from those usually adopted is the curious organisa- tion of their foreign missions and the special appeal which they can make to their potential agents.
* * * The evidence accumulated by the Royal Commission at Ottawa indicates that the Russians employed several parallel net-works, each independent of the other, and each communicating separately with its own headquarters in Moscow. In Canada, for instance, there seem to have existed two distinct military intelligence systems, each working without the knowledge of the other. In addition to_this there was the N.K.V.D., or secret police, organisation ; a Naval Intelligence system ; a Commercial Intelligence system ; and, what is most interesting of all, a " political " system, run by the second Secretary of the Embassy, the function of which was to report secretly to Moscow upon the political opinions of all the other members of the mission. It seems incredible to us, with our untrained minds, that an organisation based upon so many water-tight compartments could ever have functioned efficiently. In the documents which Gouzenko abstracted from the file (and which represent of course only a sample of the whole) there is ample evidence of friction between these several competing services. Colonel Zabotin, for instance, complains bitterly to his headquarters of the " hooligan " methods practised by the N.K.V.D.: and in Russian the word " hooligan " means, not tough merely, but clumsy and stupid. There is also evidence that these rival organisations often competed unknown to each other for the services of the same agent. It is curious that under so dis- organised a system even greater confusion did not result. But per- haps the most interesting information which this investigation pro- vides is that which relates to the methods employed for " developing " agents. Discussion groups were organised in Montreal and Ottawa which were quite harmless in themselves but which were gradually " developed " into Communist cells. Quite innocent members of these discussion groups were gradually induced to believe that they formed part of a confederacy, a conspiracy, a band of brothers. Their natural loyalties were by these methods slowly undermined, until upon the card index in the files of the Embassy their names could be docketed with the words " In the net " or "He is ours."
* * * One cannot read the evidence of some of these dupes without a certain feeling of pity. "I found it very difficult," confessed one of them, " yet I felt I should try and help." They were not suborned by money ; they were suborned by an idea. It did not occur to them that they were betraying their own country ; it appeared to them that they were furthering a cause. The circumstance that the cause of Communism is identified for many people with the cause of Soviet Russia is an unfavourable circumstance ; it faces the democ- racies with a problem unlike any which they have encountered before. The main antidote is to render our own social democracy as healthy, as extens;ve and as humane as we can
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