The lowly clerk who tried to bring down the KGB

Vasili Mitrokhin was a Russian who hated what Russia had become.

- ALEXANDER NAZARYAN

“The country seemed to be turning into a cynicai, corrupt and uncaring place,” the British author Gordon Corera writes in his unexpectedly enthralling biography of Mitrokhin, The Spy in the Archive.

By the early 1990s, decades of deception enforced by state terror had left Russia, and the rest of the Soviet Union, ina state of paranoia. War in Afghanistan devastated an entire generation of young men. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl made clear that the “leaders” in the Kremlin were, in fact, uncaring incompetents.

The myriad shortcomings of the Soviet experiment are not exactly news. What makes Corera’s book original is that he shows the USSR’s demise from the vantage point of its security services. We see how the Kremlin's obsession with national security degrades civil society. “Fear was the sinister energy that animated the rotting, hulking corpse of the Soviet Union,” as Corera puts it.

The KGB had its roots in the Cheka, one of those classic Soviet acronyms, which stands for “Extraordinary Commission.” Founded by the ruthless Feliks Dzerzhinsky, it and its progeny (the NKVD, then the KGB) became the most important institution in the Soviet Union. “Chekism,” as it was known, became the national culture. Citizens were routinely urged to report anyone they suspected of disloyalty. Artists and writers who refused to mouth platitudes were silenced in the name of patriotism.