Petrov affair: the woman stuck in the middle of a global incident

It was the scandal that put ASIO on the map, but Evdokia Petrov’s troubled life illuminates the trauma, stress and humiliation of defection.

Evdokia Petrova

The two-bedroom brick veneer house at 96 Parkmore Road in the quiet Melbourne suburb of East Bentleigh is deliberately nondescript. Until her death in 2002, its long-term occupant was Maria Anna Allyson. Her next-door neighbour recalled that she was ‘much tougher’ and ‘smarter’ than her husband, Sven, who died a decade earlier. The Allysons were the Petrovs, Evdokia and Vladimir.

The Petrovs’ defection in April 1954 made world headlines, putting ASIO on the map and guaranteeing its future standing with allied security services. What is less well known is the personal cost of defection. At the moment of defection, Evdokia was torn between loyalty to her husband and betrayal of her family and country. She chose the first, which ended her career as an Russian Intelligence Service officer, but continued to be haunted by the second.

Defection fractured relationships. Former Soviet agent Hede Massing wrote that when she forsook communism, her relationship with her husband ‘suffered a deadly blow’ and in 1950 her marriage collapsed, ‘their lives no longer sealed by the romance of revolutionary communism’.

To a lesser extent, this prefigured Evdokia’s experience. Her lonely and troubled life, throughout which her sense of betrayal remained palpable, illuminates the trauma and stress of defection. By extricating Evdokia from the shadow of her more famous husband, we see the personal cost and domestic distress that was inflicted on her life.

Many readers will be aware of the extraordinary events culminating in Evdokia’s defection in April 1954: her virtual imprisonment in one room for fourteen days inside the Soviet Embassy in Canberra after her husband’s defection; the wild scenes and threatening demonstrators at the floodlit Sydney airport as she was forcefully dragged towards the Moscow-bound plane; the lost red shoe; her palpable distress on the flight, eased only by clandestine conversations with Qantas staff; the forcible disarming of her Soviet couriers in Darwin; the frantic phone calls; the last-minute request for asylum; and that iconic photograph the next morning in newspapers worldwide of a vulnerable yet beautiful woman, one foot shoeless, limping across the tarmac. But few readers would be aware of her post-defection experience and its emotional toll.

Until the post-defection debriefings began, Evdokia was regarded as incidental to the defection of her husband. Her seemingly marginal importance is evident in the MI5 files on the Petrov case, which overwhelmingly were concerned with the high-grade intelligence that Petrov would disclose.

The thick biographical files on Petrov were absent for Evdokia. It was not until late 1954 that ASIO was able to collate intelligence from different sources and could begin to recognise Evdokia’s worth.

Evdokia possessed qualities that her husband did not. Frequent reference was made, for example, to her (not his) intellect. The embassy could operate without Vladimir, but not without her; he was expendable, she was not. The defection of a cipher clerk, who encrypted and decrypted the Soviet security service’s most valued secrets, was a counterintelligence coup for Western intelligence. With Evdokia’s defection, the Western intelligence network acquired a major catch: a cryptologist conversant with the structure of the new Soviet cryptographic processes.

But despite ASIO’s optimism that Evdokia Petrov would adapt easily to life in Australia post-defection, her assimilation was far from smooth. In September and October 1955 ASIO officers conducted a debriefing of the Petrovs, and if Evdokia’s mental state during these months was symptomatic, her experience was harrowing. It was a continuation of the profound remorse she expressed in a safe house in 1954, where she could be heard wailing through the night. Primarily, her cries were for her family, whose imagined fate in Russia she blamed on her husband.

The Petrovs fought bitterly. Her anguish would have intensified had she known that after Vladimir’s defection but before her own, he seemed, according to a senior ASIO officer, more concerned about the fate of his Alsatian dog, Jack, than about her.

Compounding this “human tragedy” was the fear of assassination. The couple were acutely aware of the long reach and long memory of the KGB, which never forgave defectors.

Evdokia’s concern for her own safety was only exacerbated by her long-held fears for the fate of her family.

She knew that the mother of Igor Gouzenko died under interrogation in Lubyanka prison following his defection, and the rest of his family suffered significantly at the hands of the KGB. In desperation she had cabled Nikita Khrushchev at the Soviet Embassy in London when he visited Great Britain in April 1956. She pleaded, ‘in the name of humanity’, for the address of her family and to be told if they were still alive.

But there was silence, both from Khrushchev and, until 1964, her family. ASIO assumed they had been sent to the Gulag. In light of the decade-long absence of contact, an ASIO report referred to Section 1.3 of the USSR Statute of Political Crimes (under s.58.1-c of the Criminal Code) under which innocent (as opposed to complicit) adult members of the family of an individual who ‘takes flight’ are ‘subject to exile to remote localities of Siberia for five years’. She too believed, and was fearful at the time, that ‘they would be evacuated to somewhere, to Siberia’.

It is arguable, if speculative, that it was her family’s fate she had in mind when Evdokia staged, for the benefit of her Soviet escort at Darwin airport, that she was forcibly abducted by the Australian authorities. If so, her deception may have worked. A letter from her sister, Tamara, dated 9 May 1964 and received via the Australian Red Cross, stated that the family ‘still lived at the old address’ (in Varsonofyevski Lane, Moscow); that her father had died of cancer in February 1959; that her brother had married and had a four-year-old son; and that she, Tamara, was employed as a senior engineer.

None of this suggests a lengthy period of incarceration in the Gulag. It was axiomatic that political prisoners would lose their apartment; they most certainly would not regain it and return to their ‘old address’. Much later, Evdokia confirmed that ‘They were not touched at all’.

It is therefore possible that the RIS continued to believe Evdokia was loyal to the Soviet Union and was staying in Australia against her will. In a sense this was true. She was not a ‘true’ defector in that she did not willingly choose asylum, and she had never expressed any wish, either at the time of defection, or after, to betray the organisation – the RIS – for which she worked, or the country she continued to love. Her defection, therefore, was different from Vladimir’s.

But the difficulties – and, in a sense, humiliation – of defection, in which the benefits and self-respect of one’s former life and the certainties of ideology are lost, are necessarily painful. For Evdokia that pain was magnified by her fears for her family, and expressed in her bitterness and anger towards Vladimir. His unenviable position as the sole surviving member of his immediate family heightened her resentment and anguish.

However, Evdokia demonstrated incredible strength. One who knew her well was Michael Bialoguski, medical practitioner and intelligence agent who, more than any other individual, was responsible for Vladimir Petrov’s defection. When his wife, Patricia, expressed sympathy for Evdokia – ‘Poor woman. I feel terribly sorry for her’ – he responded, ‘Don’t waste your pity. She can look after herself, can Mrs. Petrov’. In order to survive loneliness, the constant longing for her sister, her mother and her motherland, and a fraught marriage, immense resilience was required.

This is an edited extract from Spies and Sparrows: ASIO and the Cold War by Phillip Deery, published February 1 by Melbourne University Press.