![]() ![]() After the dissolution of the Soviet Union (in 1992) he traveled to Latvia with copies of material from the archive and walked into the American embassy in Riga. Mitrokhin made no attempt to contact any Western intelligence service during the Soviet Era. Unbeknownst to Kryuchkov and the KGB, while cataloging the documents, Mitrokin secretly copied documents by hand, making immensely detailed notes, which he smuggled to his dacha and hid under the floorboards. The transfer of the massive archive eventually took over 12 years, from 1972 to 1984. Mitrokhin, who was by that time the head of the Archives department, was assigned by the director of the First Directorate, Vladimir Kryuchkov, with the task of cataloging the documents and overseeing their orderly transfer to the new headquarters. ![]() īy the late 1960s, the KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka Building became increasingly overcrowded, and the Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, authorized the construction of a new building outside of Moscow in Yasenevo, which was to become the new headquarters of the First Chief Directorate and all Foreign Operations. Over the years, Mitrokhin became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system, especially after the stories about the struggles of dissidents and the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which led him to conclude that the Soviet system was un-reformable. After Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech, Mitrokhin became critical of the existing KGB system and was transferred from Operations to the Archives. Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin originally started his career with the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (Foreign Espionage) in Undercover operations. The original handwritten notes by Vasili Mitrokhin are still classified. In July 2014, the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College released Mitrokhin's edited Russian-language notes for public research. They also provide specifics about Guy Burgess, a British diplomat with a short career in MI6, said to be frequently under the influence of alcohol the archive indicates that he gave the KGB at least 389 top secret documents in the first six months of 1945 along with a further 168 in December 1949. The books provide details about many of the Soviet Union's clandestine intelligence operations around the world. The official historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew, wrote two books, The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005), based on material in the archives. His defection was not officially announced until 1999. ![]() When he defected to the United Kingdom in 1992, he brought the archive with him, in six full trunks. The " Mitrokhin Archive" is a collection of handwritten notes, primary sources and official documents which were secretly made, smuggled, and hidden by the KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin during the thirty years in which he served as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. The KGB sword and shield emblem appears on the covers of the six published books by Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew ![]()
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