Читать книгу Hoodwinked - the spy who didn't die - Lowell Ph.D. Green - Страница 11

I WANT TO PAUSE HERE in my story for a moment to ask a question of you. How in the world could a young, fit, trained soldier of the Soviet Union end up in Ottawa in 1943? Because in that aspect, the history books are accurate. I did arrive to begin working at the Soviet Embassy in the fall of 1943. Why have the media never asked how that could possibly be? That is if in fact I really was a trained Soviet soldier who was moved to Canada as a cipher clerk!

Think of it. Refresh your memory. Even though Hitler had failed in his attempt to capture Moscow during the winter of 1941, when I arrived in Canada in October of 1943, the 900-day-long siege of Leningrad was still underway, and more than a million were dead.

Only two months previously, at Kursk, the Soviets and Germans fought in the largest single land battle in history. More than a million men and five thousand tanks took part in that epic seven-day struggle. The Germans were finally thrown back, but in the fall of 1943 they still held large tracts of the Soviet Union, including my own country of Belarus. Millions of Soviet soldiers lay dead. More than three million had been captured and faced God knows what fate. Don’t forget, in 1943 the Soviets were all alone in fighting Hitler in Europe. D-Day and the launch of the Western Front didn’t occur until June of 1944.*

*FACT: This is not exactly true. The allies landed in Sicily on July 10, 1943, and by the fall of that year were fighting their way up the “boot” of Italy.

So I ask the question again. How could it be that a perfectly fit, well-trained Soviet soldier was not fighting shoulder to shoulder for the Motherland with his Red Army compatriots?

In all the attempts to convince everyone that I betrayed my country to help the West, this question was never asked: How I (if I really was a soldier as they still claim) got to sit out a life-and-death struggle in the Soviet Union in the safety and comfort of Ottawa while my countrymen were dying by the millions? Why would the Soviets not have sent someone too old to fight, or a disabled soldier, perhaps even a woman unfit for battle?

Don’t you find that a little strange? Could it be that not everything you were told about Igor Gouzenko is true? Is it possible that everything the history books and even the movies claim about me was a giant lie? By the time you hear me out, that is the conclusion you must come to.

So let me tell you what really happened and how it was that I escaped the carnage of the Eastern Front to assume a minor role in the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Canada.