Mitrokhin, Vasili
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Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin (russian: link=no, Васи́лий Ники́тич Митро́хин; March 3, 1922 – January 23, 2004) was a major and senior archivist for the Soviet Union's foreign intelligence service, the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, who defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 after providing the British embassy in
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with a vast collection of his notes purporting to be written copies of KGB files. These became known as the Mitrokhin Archives. The intelligence files given by Mitrokhin to the MI6 exposed an unknown number of Soviet agents, including
Melita Norwood Melita Stedman Norwood (née Sirnis; 25 March 1912 – 2 June 2005) was a British civil servant, Communist Party of Great Britain member and KGB spy. Born to a British mother and Latvian father, Norwood is most famous for supplying the Soviet ...
. He was co-author with Christopher Andrew of ''The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West'', a massive account of Soviet intelligence operations based on copies of material from the archive. The second volume, ''The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB in the World'', was published in 2005, soon after Mitrokhin's death.


Education

Mitrokhin was born in Yurasovo, in Central Russia, Ryazan Oblast, Russian SFSR. After leaving school, he entered artillery school, then attended university in Kazakh SSR, graduating with degrees in history and law.


Career


Military

Towards the end of the second World War, Mitrokhin took a job in
prosecutor A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the common law adversarial system or the Civil law (legal system), civil law inquisitorial system. The prosecution is the legal party responsible for presenting the ...
's office in Kharkiv in the Ukrainian SSR. He entered the MGB as a foreign intelligence officer in 1948. His first foreign posting was in 1952. During the 1950s, he served on various undercover assignments overseas. In 1956, for example, he accompanied the Soviet team to the Olympic Games in Australia. Later that year, however, after he had apparently mishandled an operational assignment, he was moved from operational duties to the archives of the KGB's First Chief Directorate and told he would never work in the field again.


Disillusionment

Mitrokhin sometimes dated the beginnings of his disillusionment to Nikita Khrushchev's famous speech to the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union "Hymn of the Bolshevik Party" , headquarters = 4 Staraya Square, Moscow , general_secretary = Vladimir Lenin (first) Mikhail Gorbachev (last) , founded = , banned = , founder = Vladimir Lenin , newspaper ...
congress denouncing Joseph Stalin, though it seems he may have been harbouring doubts for some time before that. For years, he had listened to broadcasts on the BBC and Voice of America, noting the gulf between their reports and party propaganda. However, when he began looking into the archives, he claimed to have been shocked by what he discovered about the KGB's systematic repression of the Soviet people. "I could not believe such evil", he recalled. "It was all planned, prepared, thought out in advance. It was a terrible shock when I read things." Between 1972 and 1984, he supervised the move of the archive of the First Chief Directorate from the Lubyanka to the new KGB headquarters at Yasenevo. While doing so, he made handwritten copies and immensely detailed notes of documents from the archive. He retired in 1985.


Defection

During the Soviet era, Mitrokhin made no attempts to contact any Western intelligence services. After the
dissolution of the Soviet Union The dissolution of the Soviet Union, also negatively connoted as rus, Разва́л Сове́тского Сою́за, r=Razvál Sovétskogo Soyúza, ''Ruining of the Soviet Union''. was the process of internal disintegration within the Sov ...
in 1991, he traveled to
Latvia Latvia ( or ; lv, Latvija ; ltg, Latveja; liv, Leţmō), officially the Republic of Latvia ( lv, Latvijas Republika, links=no, ltg, Latvejas Republika, links=no, liv, Leţmō Vabāmō, links=no), is a country in the Baltic region of ...
with copies of material from the archive and walked into the American embassy in
Riga Riga (; lv, Rīga , liv, Rīgõ) is the capital and largest city of Latvia and is home to 605,802 inhabitants which is a third of Latvia's population. The city lies on the Gulf of Riga at the mouth of the Daugava river where it meets the Ba ...
. Central Intelligence Agency officers there did not consider him to be credible, concluding that the copied documents could have been faked. He then went to the British embassy and a young diplomat there saw his potential. Following a further meeting one month later with representatives of the
Secret Intelligence Service The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...
(MI6), operations retrieved the 25,000 pages of files hidden in his house, covering operations from as far back as the 1930s. He and his family were then
exfiltrated In military tactics, extraction (also exfiltration or exfil) is the process of removing personnel when it is considered imperative that they be immediately relocated out of a hostile environment and taken to an area either occupied or controlle ...
to the United Kingdom, even though authorities of Yeltsin's Russia were not impeding the free travel abroad of active or retired members of secret services or members of their families. Richard Tomlinson, the MI6 officer imprisoned in 1997 for attempting to publish a book about his career, was one of those involved in retrieving the documents from containers hidden under the floor of the dacha.


Mitrokhin Archive

These works are collectively referred to as the Mitrokhin Archives. *Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, ''The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB'', Basic Books (1999), hardcover, ; trade paperback (September 2000), *Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, ''The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World'', Basic Books (2005) hardcover, 677 pages * *Vasiliy Mitrokhin, ''KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officer's Handbook'', Frank Cass & Co. Ltd (2002), 451 pages, *''"Chekisms", Tales of the Cheka, A KGB Anthology, Compiled and introduced by Vasiliy Mitrokhin. "Чекизмы". The Yurasov Press (2008), 435 pages, . (The book could be obtained from any copyright library).


Other publications

*Mitrokhin, Vasiliy Nikitich
''The KGB in Afghanistan''
English Edition, introduced and edited by Christian F. Ostermann and Odd Arne Westad, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Cold War International History Project, Working Paper No. 40, Washington, D.C., February 2002.


See also

* Mitrokhin Archive *
List of Eastern Bloc defectors A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...
*
List of KGB defectors This is a list of KGB officers and agents who have defected. See also * List of GRU defectors * List of Soviet and Eastern Bloc defectors * List of Soviet Union defections * List of Cold War pilot defections * Petrov Affair The Petrov ...


References

Sources * '' The Times'', January 29, 200

* '' The Daily Telegraph'', February 2, 2004


External links


The Mitrokhin Archive
fro
the Cold War International History Project
* *
The Papers of Vasiliy Mitrokhin
held at Churchill Archives Centre {{DEFAULTSORT:Mitrokhin, Vasili 1922 births 2004 deaths People from Ryazansky District, Ryazan Oblast KGB officers Soviet military personnel of World War II Soviet intelligence personnel who defected to the United Kingdom Soviet archivists Historians of espionage Russian non-fiction writers Soviet spies Cold War spies