When Russian Cipher Clerk Igor Gouzenko defected from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa in 1945 with documents exposing a Soviet spy ring, he had considerable trouble finding anyone in Ottawa to defect to. He called fruitlessly at the Justice Minister’s office, vainly told his story to the Ottawa Journal, was finally taken in tow by the Ottawa police only after embassy goons broke into his apartment. Last week, in a sadly wiser world, Dr. Mikhail Antonovich Klotchko, 59, a leading Soviet inorganic chemist, in Canada to attend the 18th International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Chemistry, had no trouble at all.

Billeted in Ottawa’s Lord Elgin Hotel with a fellow Soviet delegate, Klotchko waited until his roommate was asleep, collected only his razor and toothbrush, and slipped out into the deserted streets. Klotchko quickly found himself talking to the Mounties. By 8:30 in the morning, Klotchko’s appeal for political asylum was on Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s desk, and by 9:30 the Cabinet met to approve it.

In Moscow the Soviet Academy of Sciences blandly announced that it had never heard of the defecting scientist. But the Soviet embassy had heard, and hurriedly asked to talk to Klotchko. For 1½ hours, the embassy men tried to talk Klotchko out of his “mistake.” Reported the Mounties who sat in with Klotchko: “He saw no reason why he should change his mind.”

Soviet scientists are usually considered a pampered lot, so lavishly treated that they would have no motive for defecting. Klotchko told a different story. From 1947 to 1955, he said, he had headed Leningrad’s N.S. Turnakov Institute laboratory, and has since worked in the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. But more and more, he found his works unpublished (including a treatise on platinum refining for which he won a Stalin Prize), his laboratory equipment and his living conditions inadequate. A widower, he was forced to live in a one-room basement apartment, whose single window overlooked a truck parking lot from which exhaust fumes poured into his room. “It is the lack of human dignity in the U.S.S.R. that hurts the most.” he said. “I was depressed by the lack of contact with the outside world, the falsity of information, and the difficulty of self-expression.”

The intriguing question was whether Klotchko had brought any Soviet secrets with him. He said he had not, and so did the Mounties. Said Klotchko: “I am now an old man, and I am afraid of nothing, and I do not want my life’s work to be wasted. I am quite willing to allow the few remaining years that I have to be placed completely in the hands of the Canadian people.”

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