Stalin’s Man in Canada: Fred Rose and Soviet Espionage by David Levy (review)

Fred Rose holds a unique place in Canadian history. He was the only candidate of the Communist Party of Canada ever elected (and once re-elected) to the House of Commons. He was the only member of Parliament ever charged, convicted, and imprisoned under the Official Secrets Act. He was also the only parliamentarian to have his citizenship revoked and to be exiled from Canada.

Except for his unusual party affiliation, Fred Rose might have passed into history as just another faceless backbencher. But Fred Rose had a fateful encounter with history. In 1945 Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected with a sheaf of documents incriminating a number of Canadians in an espionage ring run out of the Soviet Embassy. A 1946 royal commission report and subsequent criminal trials were the first public signs of the Cold War between Russia and the West that would dominate international relations for the next half century.

Astonishingly, the Communist Party’s only mp was revealed as a willing cog in the Soviet spy network. Although Canadian Communism’s slavish devotion to the Kremlin was already notorious, employing an elected mp as a spy exposed reckless stupidity by both the Canadian party and Rose’s Soviet spymasters. Neither the tenuous political position of the Communists nor the wartime prestige of the Soviet ally survived the Gouzenko bombshell.

By the time he was released from prison in 1951, Rose found himself a pariah in the eyes of mainstream Canadian society but also, to his chagrin, in the view of his former comrades in the Communist Party who cynically abandoned him. Unable to re-establish himself in civilian life and unwell from his prison experience, Rose travelled to Eastern Europe. Once he was out of the country, the government seized the opportunity to rid themselves of Rose once and for all. A naturalized Canadian, he was not deportable, but the bureaucrats were able to use a technicality to revoke his citizenship due to continuous absence. Rose lived out the rest of his days until his death in 1982 in his native Poland. He found the grim reality of an actual Communist state far from utopian fantasy.

Rose’s story is worth telling, if mainly for its significance extrinsic to Rose himself. David Levy has attempted a biography that purports to place his subject in a context of wider meaning. Unfortunately, he has fully succeeded in neither endeavour. Stalin’s Man in Canada will be useful as a source, but one that will have to be employed selectively.

Mr Levy was not perhaps well served by his publisher. Disorganized, rambling, repetitive, the book reads very much as a raw manuscript crying out for a strong editorial hand. To be fair, Mr Levy, who is not an academic historian, has done a creditable job of covering the secondary and primary sources and has tracked down some personal correspondence and documentation not previously available. Even here, however, there are oddities in presentation. For instance, book references do not indicate pages, even where there is a specific citation or a direct quotation.

Levy’s approach as biographer often leaves puzzling gaps. For instance, Rose appears at the point of his initial 1943 by-election victory in Montreal Cartier almost out of nowhere, as it were. There is little sense of the way in which Rose’s mind was shaped, how he became a convinced Communist, of his character.

To be sure, Fred Rose presents limitations to any biographer. Not much of a theorist or thinker, not one to reflect on the significance of his actions, Rose was, in Levy’s words “a pragmatic guy, a schmoozer, a street organizer.” No one would have contemplated writing a biography of a ward heeler, except that this one happened to be a Communist spy.

Levy’s difficulties multiply when he tries to place his subject in a wider interpretive framework. Considerable sections of the book are devoted not to Rose, but...