Petrov affair

The Petrov Affair was a Cold War spy incident in Australia in April 1954, concerning Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary of the Soviet embassy in Canberra.

Petrov, despite his relatively junior diplomatic status, was a colonel in (what became in 1954) the KGB, the Soviet secret police, and his wife was an MVD officer. The Petrovs had been sent to the Canberra embassy in 1951 by the Soviet security chief, Lavrentiy Beria. After Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953, Beria had been arrested and shot by Stalin's successors, and Vladimir Petrov evidently feared that, if he returned to the Soviet Union, he would be purged as a "Beria man".

Petrov made contact with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and offered to provide evidence of Soviet espionage in exchange for political asylum. The defection was arranged by Michael Bialoguski, a Polish doctor and musician, and part-time ASIO agent, who had cultivated Petrov for nearly two years, befriending him and taking him to visit prostitutes in Sydney's King's Cross area. Bialoguski introduced Petrov to a senior ASIO officer, Ron Richards, who offered Petrov asylum plus £5,000 in exchange for all the documents he could bring with him from the embassy. Petrov defected on 3 April 1954.

Petrov did not tell his wife Evdokia of his intentions; apparently he planned to defect without her. After falsely claiming that Australian authorities had kidnapped Petrov, the MVD sent two couriers to Australia to fetch Evdokia Petrova. Word of this leaked out and on 19 April there were violent anti-Communist demonstrations at Sydney Airport as Evdokia Petrova was escorted by the KGB men to the aircraft. On the plane, on radioed instructions from Prime Minister Robert Menzies, a flight attendant asked her if she was happy being escorted back to the USSR, but she did not give a clear answer, as she was wracked with indecision - defection could have severe consequences for her family in the USSR. Menzies decided that he could not allow her to be removed in this way, and when the aircraft stopped for refuelling at Darwin Airport, she was seized from the MVD men by ASIO officials. (In order to separate Petrova from the MVD, the ASIO officials confronted them on the grounds that they were carrying arms, which it was illegal to do on an aircraft.) The ASIO officials offered Petrova asylum, which she accepted, after speaking to her husband by phone. By now it was the early hours of 20 April 1954.

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