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imately 300,000 files in the �CD archive prior to their transfer to the
new headquarters. While supervising the checking of files, the compilation
of inventories and the writing of index cards, Mitrokhin was
able to inspect what files he wished in one or other of his offices. ‘�ew
KGB officers apart from Mitrokhin’, Andrew sums up the role of his
collaborator, ‘have ever spent as much time reading, let alone noting,
foreign intelligence files. Outside the �CD archives, only the most senior
officers shared his unrestricted access, and none had the time to
read more than a fraction of the material noted by him’ (p. 10).
The disillusioned archivist started to smuggle documents he had
copied by hand, most of them top secret, which illustrated the dayto-day
schizophrenia of ideology and reality. Mitrokhin hid the
growing quantity of archival loot by packing it into a milk-churn,
later into a clothes-boiler, tin trunks, and aluminium cases which he
buried beneath his family dacha thirty-six kilometers outside Moscow.
When he retired in 1984, Mitrokhin started to sort his notes and
thought about a way to get his material (and himself) to the West for
publication. In 1992 he was brought to London by the British Secret
Intelligent Service (SIS). It seems no exaggeration to claim that ‘[n]o
one who spied for the Soviet Union at any period between the October
Revolution and the eve of the Gorbachev era can now be confident
that his or her secrets are still secure’ (p. 1).
Christopher Andrew has composed from this mass of defector’s
material an excellent book. It is not only readable, but also full of
exciting information for any historian who is interested in international
history from the Bolshevik Revolution to the Soviet system of
the 1980s. Mitrokhin and Andrew met for the first time in 1995 when
the KGB pensioner had already given his information to the SIS, by
which time the SIS had been in possession of his material for more
than three years. Security services and intelligence agencies from
several countries, for example, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz,
had been brought into contact with the defector and used his
information for their counter-intelligence activities. The time to publish
the essence of his files had come. Andrew was a congenial collaborator
to Mitrokhin since he had already published a history of the
KGB with Oleg Gordievsky. 1 This was also based on inside informa-
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The Mitrokhin Archive
1 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its
�oreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London, 1991).