Julie Kimber and Phillip Deery explore the challenges of biographical research through the case of Evdokia Petrov.

Evdokia Petrov may not have been, to paraphrase Winston Churchill on Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery, but she was certainly an enigma. Her journey from decorated Soviet intelligence officer, to reluctant defector, to living unhappily undercover in a suburban brick veneer, is a complicated one.

We started what we believed would be a conventional biographical portrait, extending on what was previously known about her life. But it ended in uncertainty: the gap between fact and illusion, truth and deception, was too wide. We sought neither to circumvent her dissembling, nor to deface her gravestone.

What we did not accept was the customary image – immortalised in the iconic photograph at Mascot airport – of Evdokia Petrov (Petrova) as a vulnerable, even helpless, woman. We wanted to restore her agency.

Perceptions of Petrova

At the time of her defection in April 1954 and during the subsequent Royal Commission on Espionage, perceptions of Petrova were shaped by gendered stereotypes. Captivated reporters and observers constantly emphasised her beauty, hairstyle, lipstick and impeccable clothing. Even ASIO commented on her “aptitude for clothes and cosmetics,” while her comfortable assimilation into domesticity and suburbia was stressed.

This side of Evdokia Petrov dominated the public imagination and enabled her to construct a persona that hid more than it revealed about her character.

In the years since, however, our collective understanding of Petrova altered, as historians uncovered more about her role before and after her defection. That research tells us that during her post-defection debriefings by Australian, British and Swedish intelligence services, Petrova proved to be an equally, if not more, important asset than her husband, Vladimir.

She had operational experience as an agent recruiter in Sweden. She was an expert cryptologist responsible for encrypting and decrypting top-secret cables. She knew the identity of agents cultivated or recruited. She had a good memory. And according to an MI5 assessment, she was “far superior mentally” to Vladimir.

Uncovering the Enigma

We wished to emphasise this story, but as we read deeper into the source material, we found ourselves scratching our heads. In Australia, it was presumed that neither of the Petrovs had infiltrated Russian émigré communities. Bialoguski’s account emphasises Vladimir’s incompetence and corruptibility. His take on Petrova is equally inadequate. As with the Petrovs’ own account, Empire of Fear, Bialoguski’s was sufficiently self-serving to require heavy circumspection.

Instead, Robert Manne’s excellent study of the Petrovs became our grounding source, with its nuanced appreciation of them both. Within this framing, we read the many ASIO files on the couple. In these files, the tempestuous nature of their relationship and their fragile mental state is all-encompassing. This meshed with Petrova’s public persona, in which she sought sympathy for her plight, emphasising the loneliness and paralysis of defection—a defection she continually framed as being out of her control.

While we did not challenge the complexities of her reality, we began to question our capacities to understand a woman whose speciality was deception. Small incongruities began to appear in the record. Listening to Robert Manne’s interview with Petrova and the 2004 interview of Regina Meinhold by Bill Haskett and Diana Tapscott forced us to take stock and look again at the records.

Our initial dismissal of the contemporary emphasis on Petrova’s dress and meticulous care in her appearance as careless sexism (which, of course, it was) came back into the frame after listening to Regina Meinhold’s story. After telling her interviewers that she met Petrova in a textile shop and was asked by Petrova to sew some clothes for her, we had a clue that would unravel our project.

Smoking Gun?

After that first encounter, Meinhold spoke of how she became Petrova’s closest friend in Australia. We have no reason to object to this claim. Meinhold’s description of their friendship is full, warm and believable. As an anti-Soviet Latvian, Meinhold does not shy away from her own history, giving additional weight to her assertions.

But the description of that first meeting grated. Why would Petrova, with her self-acknowledged love of Western fashion, ask a stranger to sew her clothes? Even if the story told to Regina is true––that Petrova wanted them for when she returned to Russia––why ask a woman with no experience as a seamstress? As Regina continued her story, there were additional red flags and hints of Petrova’s numerous deceptions. We argued back and forth about the weight of these.

We tried to grapple too with a parallel question: what to make of fact of Meinhold’s Latvian background? In this, we also equivocated. Part of their job as agents in Australia was to keep tabs on the Russian émigré community. Prior to their defection, Petrov waited in the car each time Petrova visited Regina. Elsewhere, we know that the couple visited the Russian Club together, and both were alert to the characters who animated the shadows of Australia’s Cold War intrigues. Meinhold opened a door to another dimension.

What we discovered along the way may not have been a ‘smoking gun’, but it was a revelation –– of the limitations of biographical study and archival sources, and of the distortions and the difficulties uncovering identities that were actively constructed. Ultimately, our failure to unravel, definitively, Petrova’s many layers demonstrate her capacities but reveals few of her mysteries. She remains to us as enigmatic as ever.

Julie Kimber teaches history and politics at Swinburne University of Technology.

Phillip Deery is an emeritus professor of history at Victoria University, Melbourne. He specialises in the fields of communism, espionage, and the Cold War.

His books include Spies and Sparrows: ASIO and the Cold War (2022) and Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York (2014), and the co-authored The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents, Third Edition (2017), and Espionage and Betrayal: Behind the Scenes of the Cold War  (2011).’

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