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

When Mitrokhin retired in 1984, he was still preoccupied with the Afghan War. He spent the first year and a half of his retirement sorting through his notes, extracting the material on Afghanistan, and assembling it in a large volume with a linking narrative. Despite Gorbachev’s call for glasnost after he became Party leader in 1985, Mitrokhin did not believe the Soviet system would ever allow the truth about the war to be told. Increasingly, however, he began to think of ways of transporting his archive to the West and publishing it there.

One novel method suggested itself on May 28, 1987, when a single-engine Cessna piloted by a nineteen-year-old West German, Matthias Rust, crossed the Finnish border into Soviet airspace and flew undetected for 450 miles before landing in Red Square. After an hour of confusion, during which Kremlin security guards wondered whether Rust was an actor in a film, he was taken away to the KGB’s Lefortovo Prison. Mitrokhin briefly considered but quickly abandoned the idea of using a microlite from a KGB sports club to fly with his archive in the opposite direction to Finland.

The most practical of the various schemes considered by Mitrokhin before the collapse of the Soviet Union was to get a position on the local Party committee which issued permits for foreign travel, obtain permits for himself and his family, then book reservations on a cruise from Leningrad to Odessa in the Black Sea. At one of the cruise’s West European ports of call, Mitrokhin would make contact with the authorities and arrange to leave his archive in a dead letter-box near Moscow for collection by a Western intelligence agency. He eventually abandoned the idea because of the difficulty of separating himself from the Soviet tour group and the ever-watchful group leaders for long enough to tell his story and arrange the hand-over.

As the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 and the Soviet Bloc began to disintegrate, Mitrokhin told himself to be patient and wait for his opportunity. In the meantime he carried on typing up his handwritten notes in his Moscow flat and at the two family dachas, assembling some of them in volumes covering the FCD’s chief target countries—first and foremost the United States, known in KGB jargon as the “Main Adversary.” He shared the relief of most Muscovites at the failure of the hardline coup in August 1991 to depose Gorbachev and reestablish the one-party Soviet state. It came as no surprise to Mitrokhin that the chief ringleader in the failed coup was Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, head of the FCD from 1974 to 1988 and chairman of the KGB from 1988 until the coup.

Though Kryuchkov proved better at public relations than most previous KGB chairmen, he had long represented much of what Mitrokhin most detested in the FCD. As a young diplomat at the Soviet embassy in Budapest, Kryuchkov had caught the eye of the ambassador, Yuri Andropov, by his uncompromising opposition to the “counter-revolutionary” Hungarian Uprising of 1956. When Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967, Kryuchkov became head of his personal secretariat and a loyal supporter of his obsessive campaign against “ideological subversion” in all its forms. The files seen by Mitrokhin showed that, as head of the FCD, Kryuchkov collaborated closely with the KGB Fifth (Ideological Subversion) Directorate in the war against dissidents at home and abroad.²⁹ He had made a senior member of the Fifth Directorate, I. A. Markelov, one of the deputy heads of the FCD with responsibility for coordinating the struggle against ideological subversion.³⁰ The failed coup of August 1991 marked an appropriately discreditable end to Kryuchkov’s KGB career. Instead of shoring up the Soviet Union and the one-party state, it served only to hasten their collapse.

On October 11, 1991, the State Council of the disintegrating Soviet Union abolished the KGB in its existing form. The former FCD was reconstituted as the SVR, the foreign intelligence service of the Russian Federation, independent of the internal security service. Instead of repudiating its Soviet past, however, the SVR saw itself as the heir of the old FCD. Mitrokhin had seen the FCD file on the SVR’s newly appointed head, Academician Yevgeni Maksimovich Primakov, previously Director of the Institute of World Economics and International Relations and one of Gorbachev’s leading foreign policy advisers. The file identified Primakov as a KGB co-optee, codenamed MAKSIM, who had been sent on frequent intelligence missions to the United States and the Middle East.³¹ Primakov went on to become Boris Yeltsin’s Foreign Minister in 1996 and Prime Minister in 1998.