1954
Evdokia Petrov’s shoe
Reds under the bed
Evdokia Petrov’s shoe is brandished by a member of the public as the crowd attempts to save her from the KGB agents dragging her on to their plane.
On 13 April 1954, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced the defection of Vladimir Petrov, a third secretary at the Soviet embassy in Canberra. Menzies, behind in the polls, then announced a royal commission to investigate Soviet espionage in Australia, and called an election.
There was good reason to fear the expansion of communism. In Australia, communists controlled the most militant trade unions. However, as real as the Cold War was, conservative politicians amped up community fears that a fifth column of communist agents lay dormant in the suburbs, waiting for their moment to strike.
Vladimir Petrov’s defection on 3 April 1954 – conveniently, moments before an election was due to be called – appeared to Dr H V Evatt, leader of the Australian Labor Party, as a stunt. The ALP won a majority vote at the 1954 poll but was seven seats short of victory.
Back at The Lodge, Menzies announced a royal commission into the so-called Petrov affair and into communist infiltration of the Australian government. Petrov appeared to be a low-level embassy employee whom Menzies tricked up into a counterintelligence coup. In fact, Vladimir and his wife, Evdokia, were experienced spies who had arrived in Australia in 1951 after having spent their entire careers inside the Soviet state security system. He was a lieutenant colonel and she a captain.
Vladimir’s taste for sex workers made him susceptible to grooming by Australian agents. Meanwhile, the political winds within the always-treacherous MVD (the forerunner of the KGB) turned against the couple. Vladimir faced recall to Moscow and life in a gulag – or execution. His decision to defect was a simple one for him. So, on 3 April 1954, he came in from the cold without telling Evdokia.
On 19 April, Evdokia and two security agents left the embassy for the long journey. A mob had gathered at Kingsford Smith (Mascot) Airport in Sydney and broke through the cordon, rushed on to the tarmac and tried to grab Evdokia from her minders. In the melee, she lost one of her red shoes.
On the plane, flight attendant Joyce Bull gave Evdokia a pair of shoes to replace those she had been wearing at Mascot. While the plane made its slow progress across Australia, Menzies and the Australian Security Intelligence Association tried to determine via the pilot whether she really wanted to defect. Given that her likely fate was execution, she did.
The Australians then crafted a plan to create a distraction when the plane touched down in Darwin for refuelling. Australian security agents manoeuvred themselves into a position close enough to the prisoner to ask if she wanted asylum in Australia. She said she did and it was immediately granted. The Russians left Australia empty-handed.
The Petrovs had extensive knowledge of Soviet codes, organisations, structures and techniques and the identities of several hundred agents around the world, including six Australian spies. They confirmed that all the consular staff at the Russian embassy in London were members of the MVD, and had information about the defection of British double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.
Vladimir and Evdokia moved to the suburbs as Sven and Maria Anna Allyson of Bentleigh, Melbourne. They found low-level jobs and remained unhappily married. Vladimir lived in fear that he would be assassinated and drank excessively until his death in 1991. Evdokia worried that her family in Russia would be punished; her father did lose his job but she was eventually able to correspond with her mother and sister Tamara Alekseyevna Kartseva, who migrated to Australia in 1990. Evdokia died in 2002.