Igor Gouzenko

Igor Gouzenko (1919-1982), a cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa of Ukrainian heritage who became a Canadian citizen after defecting in 1945 with documents exposing a major Soviet spy ring, is credited with triggering public awareness of the Cold War. His most notable works are the autobiography This Was My Choice (1948) and the novel The Fall of a Titan (1954), the latter winning the Governor General's Award for fiction and nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.