The Spy in the Archive by Gordon Corera
In Gordon Corera’s The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB, we read how in 1968 a sixteen-year-old street tough swaggered his way up to the KGB building in Leningrad to ask how he could get a job there. He was told to come back when he either completed military service or earned a university degree. His name was Vladimir Putin.
During that same year, there was a KGB officer working as an archivist in Moscow’s powerful First Chief Directorate office, the organization responsible for foreign operations and intelligence. He was undertaking a secret mission, one that he devised and kept completely to himself. His name was Vasili Mitrokhin, and his mission was to copy the archives that would hasten the demise of the Soviet Union.
It didn’t start off this way for Mitrokhin, notes Corera. He was once a believer of the communist ideals that had propelled Russia into the revolution of 1917, so much so he was honored to become a KGB officer. But then the reality of the work almost left him speechless. Of his early assignments, he would only say, “I saw horrors.” And after he bungled a high-profile assignment as a field agent, he was told he would never again work abroad. Being sent to the archives room was seen as a humiliation, a way to park a failed officer and forget about him.
Dissident movements find a way under authoritarian regimes. Mitrokhin was impressed with the bravery of underground writers, especially since they knew the full weight of KGB power would find and arrest them. He may not have been in a position to resist via his writings, but he was the only person who had complete access to one very specific KGB basement archive. Mitrokhin quite literally worked in the belly of the beast.
Despite a brief period of hope resulting from Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization efforts—specifically his allowing the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich— Mitrokhin resented how the Soviets encouraged Russians to inform on each other. He also knew that Soviet party elites sought only to perpetuate their own power. Year after year he copied documents through an encrypted code. On weekends he traveled alone to his family’s dacha outside of Moscow to hide the transcripts under the dwelling. What to do with these papers was a whole other conundrum. It wasn’t until the fall of the Soviet Union that he had his first viable chance.
It was still an exceptionally dangerous environment. It’s not as though most in the KGB stopped being authoritarians. They wanted power and influence in this new Russia, so they would certainly arrest someone caught with secrets that would undermine their futures.
Corera structures the book so that we know the results right from the start. He then slowly details how in 1992 Mitrokhin ended up walking into the British Embassy in Lithuania. The American Embassy was his first attempt. But given that they were already overrun with a flood of Russians seeking to trade state secrets in exchange for either money or relocation, Mitrokhin was lost in flux (which he resented).
In many ways, reading how British MI6 and Mitrokhin finally agreed to various arrangements are the most compelling parts of the book. It was a decorous dance between the two parties. Mitrokhin was savvy enough to structure his notes so that anyone wanting access to them had to agree to his demands. Of course the British were slow to trust this unknown KGB officer. Was he a double agent? In addition, unknown defectors were often viewed with great skepticism. They had a saying: “Defectors defect because they are defective.”
The breadth of the archive meant the CIA and the FBI were brought in to examine its contents. Yet it’s not as though the American and British spooks were jumping up and down with delight. Here were documents showing the number of moles within their ranks. So the archive could also be viewed as an itemization of their own failures.
Once Mitrokhin told his wife and son that he had been—surprise—hording state secrets for decades (they had no idea he had done so), MI6 ushered them out of Russia and into London in a series of events that’s worthy of a spy movie. Mitrokhin would spend the remainder of his days as an unhappy exile, a critic of the capitalist West. He was akin to Solzhenitsyn in that regard. Far from glorifying the West, they were Russian nationalists lamenting the loss of Russia mysticism to Bolshevik subjugation.
That sixteen year old who once knocked on the KGB’s door is now acting out his own laments. Putin once remarked that the fall of the Soviet Union was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” His war with Ukraine is a clear indication that he too misses the old days, with an estimated quarter of a million Russian soldiers having been killed in service to his revanchist dreams. It’s been said that Russia never had a leader who cared about the Russian people. Corera’s book certainly underscores this judgement.
Review by Jason Sullivan
