Mitrokhin Archive reaches Britain

Vasili Mitrokhin was an archivist in the KGB's First Chief Directorate, its foreign intelligence arm. From 1972 he supervised the transfer of its files to a new headquarters at Yasenevo outside Moscow, and over twelve years he copied extracts by hand, smuggling the notes home in his shoes and clothing and hiding them under his dacha floor. In 1992, after the Soviet Union collapsed, he walked into the British embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, with samples. Britain's intelligence service MI6 brought him, his family and his trunks of notes to Britain later that year.¹²

The material led to investigations in many countries. In 1999 Mitrokhin and the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew published the first volume of The Mitrokhin Archive, which revealed among other things that Melita Norwood, an 87-year-old great-grandmother in Britain, had spied for Moscow for decades. A second volume in 2005 covered the KGB in Asia, Africa and Latin America and caused political storms in India and Italy. Mitrokhin died in 2004, and his papers were opened to the public at Cambridge's Churchill Archives Centre in 2014.¹³⁴