The Gouzenko affair led to widespread investigations in Canada, the US and Great Britain. They also believe it set the stage for the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. Several historians and criticsĬonsider the Gouzenko affair, as it was known, to mark the beginning of the Cold War era. This included highly classified information concerning research on radar, code-breaking and the atomic bomb. They were privy toĭiplomatic, scientific and military secrets. Canadians targeted by Soviet espionage worked in sensitive positions. These revelations caused a potentially dangerous international crisis. Let us never forget this: Our unrest is the heart of their success.” Our enemies are to be found abroad and at home. Not be deceived,” he said, “we are today in the midst of a Cold War. On 16 April 1947, American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch used the phrase Cold War to describe the relationship between the US and Soviet Union in a speech written for him by British journalist Herbert Bayard Swope. In it, he described what he predicted would be a nuclear stalemate between two or three superpowers,Įach of which possessed weapons that could wipe out millions of people in a few seconds.

Montreal, the United States and the United Kingdom who had been providing Moscow with classified information.Įnglish writer George Orwell first used the term Cold War in a 19 October 1945 essay entitled “You and the Atomic Bomb” in a British magazine. According to the documents, the Soviet embassy was home to several spies. Gouzenko left the embassy with documents that proved his country had been spying on its wartime allies: Canada, Britain and the United States. Just weeks after the end of the Second World War, He was a Soviet cipher clerk stationed at the Soviet Union’s embassy in Ottawa. In February 1946, the Canadian government revealed that it had given political asylum to Igor Gouzenko. “iron curtain” had fallen across the European continent.

This situation led former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill to state on 5 March 1946 that an This was done without due democratic process. In particular, the Soviets placed and kept localĬommunist parties in power as puppet governments in once-independent countries across Eastern Europe. American and British diplomatic relations with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union severely cooled after the war, over several issues. They were deeply suspicious of the other side’s world plans. The Cold War was rooted in the collapse of the American-British-Soviet alliance that defeated Germany and Japan in the Second World War.

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