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CHRISTOPHER ANDREW and VASILI MITROKHIN, The Mitrokhin
Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1999), 996 pp. ISBN 0 713 99358 8. £25.00
‘Monasterium sine archivum est quasi castra sine firmamentum’ is an
oft-quoted medieval catch-phrase. The KGB, abolished on 11 October
1991, was no monastery. But in a way its employees felt as if they were
members of a brotherhood of a chosen few, serving the principles of
Marxist–Leninist ideology for a country encircled by enemies. In reality
it had become a machine of mistrust, striving for total control and
caught in a process of deception and delusion, which often led to a
deformation of human character, and brutality in the methods used
against all forms of opposition. All its ideas, concepts, and actions are
collected and reflected in its innermost body: the archive. It sounds
incredible and even fantastic that there was a leak in this massive
body of institutionalized suspicion for more than a dozen years—and
that it was kept secret and undiscovered for another decade. Vasili
Mitrokhin defected to Britain in 1992. He brought with him numerous
files of the utmost secrecy which led to something approaching an
earthquake in circles of KGB agents. The �BI called it ‘the most complete
and extensive intelligence ever received from any source’ (p. 1).
The ‘plot’ might have been written by an imaginative novelist: a
sober and sometimes idealistic archivist within the system of the
KGB recognizes that the ‘official’ version and the reality of the institution
he works for and the society he lives in are two rather different
and even contradictory parts of his life. Mitrokhin, who began his
career in the foreign intelligence service in 1948, and was sent to several
postings abroad after 1952, was influenced by the struggle of
official Soviet politics with its dissidents and by the information he
received during his foreign service and from Western broadcasts.
Mitrokhin’s experiences and second thoughts culminated in the will
to collect evidence about the mutiple KGB actions all over the world.
His ‘opportunity came in June 1972, when the �irst Chief (�oreign
Intelligence) Directorate [�CD] left its overcrowded central Moscow
offices in the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka ... and moved to a
new building south-east of Moscow at Yasenevo’ (p. 9). Mitrokhin
was in charge of some of the most secret files: ‘�or the next ten years,
working from private offices both in the Lubyanka and at Yasenevo,
Mitrokhin was alone responsible for checking and sealing the approx-
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