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(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)
This is a competent telling of the life, work and motivations of the former KGB officer and Archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and includes a compelling account of how MI6 exfiltrated the entire Mitrokhin family unit from Russia via Lithuania and Sweden, which is based on new research by the author.
Quite often, the motivations of defectors are peculiar, not very noble, and sometimes of the moment, in that something upsets them and they defect pretty swiftly, or at least at the first opportunity thereafter.
Mitrokhin is interesting because he not only spent decades preparing for his defection whilst still serving in the KGB (which he saw as the “Cheka” unchanged in its essentials since the revolution and in some ways contiguous with the Czarist secret police): he then spent seven further years working on the material he had obtained to make it understandable (or so he hoped) to people who mattered. After his defection, he spent the last years of his life doing further work on the huge volume of highly secret and important material he brought with him. (Not all highly secret material is actually important: the other thing which sets Mitrokhin apart from most other defectors is that he was highly selective, knew what things to take and which to ignore and remained sufficiently disciplined to keep doing that, day after day till years ran into decades. He selected the good stuff, but he appears to have also managed to take a very high proportion of ALL the good stuff and not just one or two choice treasures that he happened across.)
The motivation required for that sort of effort is extraordinary and the study of it is one of the most important things which the author does with this book.
Mitrokhin loved Russia, all his life, in its entirety. He believed that Russia’s natural wealth should be respectfully exploited only for the benefit of all its people, and he believed that the Russian people should be exploited or oppressed by no-one. He was not a Bolshevist and, whilst the author paints him as a Russian nationalist with a vague spiritual angle, Mitrokhin resembles the “Diggers” of 17th century England as much as anything else. He certainly saw the Orthodox Church as being corrupted by the Cheka (Mr Putin has since corrupted it even more thoroughly) and his horror at the way the cult of informers corrupted (and still corrupts) Russian society is also strongly reminiscent of the dissident Protestants, such as Georg Elser and Sophie Scholl, in NAZI Germany.
There are two other strands to his motivation. One of these, his fury not at what the Cheka did to him (he was one of them, after all!) but what they made him do to innocent people, ties in with his seeing life and freedom as sacred. As does his determination to use his long-planned defection to secure better medical and social care for his handicapped son. The Soviet Utopia, even when mitigated by a “captured” Orthodox Church, would have had no more place for an imperfect child than the Nazi Arcadia. And Putin certainly has not the slightest use for those not strong enough to send into battle!
In his lifetime, Mitrokhin’s dream of using the truth about the Cheka to free the Russian people from its grasp went unrealised, due largely to the unwillingness of the Free World to let go of its pipe-dream of a Cheka-led Russia as a cooperative partner in the new world order. (Whilst the Cheka never actually held total power in the Soviet Union, it does hold total power in Russia today.) But Mitrokhin’s truth still exists: it has been published in the West even as it remains unread in Russia. Time may be short, but there is still time for that truth to slay the Cheka.
The Spy in the Archive by Gordon Corera is published on the 5th of June 2025 by 4th Estate/William Collins.
