The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

In the aftermath of the secret speech Mitrokhin became too outspoken for his own good. Though his criticisms of the way the KGB had been run were mild by Western standards, late in 1956 Mitrokhin was moved from operations to the FCD archives, where his main job was answering queries from other departments and provincial KGBs.⁵ Mitrokhin discovered that Beria’s personal archive had been destroyed on Khrushchev’s orders so as to leave no trace of the compromising material he had collected on his former colleagues. Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov, chairman of the KGB from 1954 to 1958, dutifully reported to Khrushchev that the files had contained much “provocative and libelous” material.⁶

Mitrokhin was an avid reader of the Russian writers who had fallen out of favor in the final years of Stalinist rule and began to be published again during the mid-1950s. The first great literary event in Moscow after Stalin’s death was the publication in 1954, for the first time since 1945, of new poems by Boris Pasternak, the last leading Russian author to have begun his career before the Revolution. Published in a literary magazine under the title “Poems from the Novel Doctor Zhivago,” they were accompanied by a brief description of the epic but still unfinished work in which they were to appear. However, the completed text of Doctor Zhivago, which followed the meandering life of its enigmatic hero from the final phase of Tsarist rule to the early years of the Soviet regime, was judged far too subversive for publication and was officially rejected in 1956. In the novel, when Zhivago hears the news of the Bolshevik Revolution, “He was shaken and overwhelmed by the greatness of the moment, and thought of its significance for the centuries to come.” But Pasternak goes on to convey an unmistakable sense of the spiritual emptiness of the regime which emerged from it. Lenin is “vengeance incarnate” and Stalin a “pockmarked Caligula.”

Pasternak became the first Soviet author since the 1920s to circumvent the banning of his work in Russia by publishing it abroad. As he handed the typescript of Doctor Zhivago to a representative of his Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, he told him with a melancholy laugh: “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad!” Soon afterwards, acting on official instructions, Pasternak sent a telegram to Feltrinelli insisting that his novel be withdrawn from publication; privately, however, he wrote a letter telling him to go ahead. Published first in Italian in November 1957, Doctor Zhivago became a bestseller in twenty-four languages. Some Western critics hailed it as the greatest Russian novel since Tolstoy’s Resurrection, published in 1899. Official outrage in Moscow at Doctor Zhivago’s success was compounded by the award to Pasternak of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. In a cable to the Swedish Academy, Pasternak declared himself “immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.” The newspaper of the Soviet Writers’ Union, the Literaturnaya Gazeta, however, denounced him as “a literary Judas who betrayed his people for thirty pieces of silver—the Nobel Prize.” Under immense official pressure, Pasternak cabled Stockholm withdrawing his acceptance of the prize “in view of the significance given to this award in the society to which I belong.”⁷

Though Pasternak was not one of his own favorite authors, Mitrokhin saw the official condemnation of Doctor Zhivago as typifying Khrushchev’s cultural barbarism. “The development of literature and art in a socialist society,” Khrushchev boorishly insisted, “proceeds… as directed by the Party.” Mitrokhin was so outraged by the neo-Stalinist denunciations of Pasternak by Moscow’s literary establishment that in October 1958 he sent an anonymous letter of protest to the Literaturnaya Gazeta. Though he wrote the letter with his left hand in order to disguise his handwriting, he remained anxious for some time that his identity might be discovered. Mitrokhin knew from KGB files the immense resources which were frequently deployed to track down anonymous letter-writers. He was even worried that, by licking the gum on the back of the envelope before sealing it, he had made it possible for his saliva to be identified by a KGB laboratory. The whole episode strengthened his resentment at Khrushchev’s failure to follow his secret speech of 1956 by a thoroughgoing program of de-Stalinization. Khrushchev, he suspected, had personally ordered Pasternak’s persecution as a warning to all those inclined to challenge his authority.