Igor Gouzenko defected 80 years ago. His Cold War-era bravery hasn't been forgotten

For 20 years, the grave of a former Soviet cipher clerk whose defection revealed a secret spy ring in Canada lay unmarked in a Mississauga, Ont., cemetery.

Left without a headstone amid lingering fears of retribution from Moscow, the gravesite of Igor Gouzenko and his wife Svetlana has been identified since 2002 by a large Muskoka rock bearing a plaque with their names and the phrase "We chose freedom for mankind."

A small gathering at the grave this weekend marked 80 years since Gouzenko defected from the Soviet Union, smuggling 109 secret documents in his shirt out of the Ottawa embassy and delivering them to the offices of the Ottawa Journal newspaper in 1945.

Dubbed the Gouzenko Affair, the defection is considered by some historians as the beginning of the Cold War.

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