Customer Reviews

The Petrov Affair

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In 1954 the Australian Labour Party seemed poised for electoral victory. Just before the election the senior KGB officer in the Soviet Embassy defected to Australian authorities. A short time after his defection armed Soviet Body Guards tried to take his wife back to Russia but were stopped from doing so at the Darwin airport. Photos of a distressed Mrs Petrov being dragged across the airport tarmac by two Soviet Goons hit the front pages of all major newspapers.

Petrov?s defection was one of the more significant defections of Soviet Agents in the post war period. Amongst the documents he brought with him two caused fireworks. One was a briefing that had been prepared for the Soviets by an employee of the Labour Opposition. Another was a document prepared by a leading journalist.

The conservative Prime Minister Menzies who had seemed poised for certain defeat immediately established a Royal Commission into Communism in Australia. The existence of documents prepared in the office of the leader of the opposition was a tremendous embarrassment. In the following election Menzies was able to win.

These events became known as the Petrov affair. The loss of the 1954 election led to the Labour leader Evatt having what was probably some form of mental collapse. He from this point made a series of errors of judgement that led to the party splitting and it was out of office for another 18 years.

The fortuitous juxtaposition of the events have led writers on the left to believe that the whole affair was orchestrated by the Liberals for their short term political advantage. Manne has gone through all the sources, some of which at the time of writing had just come into the public domain.

His book is a convincing argument for the fact that no conspiracy existed. Rather Menzies simply capitalised on chance events that occurred in a miraculous way to get him out of a deep political hole.

Manne?s argument is convincing. The book itself is reasonably amusing. Petrov himself was a chronic alcoholic and it seems clear that he was one of the more incompetent KGB operatives to be let loose on the Western World. Despite his incompetence he was able to provide the Australian secret service with an account of what had happened in the past when KGB operatives womanised and drank less, and as a result could do some work. The political events around the affair have meant that most Australians have never released that the defection was in fact of some importance apart from what it did to destroy the electoral fortunes of the Australian Labour Party.