: Beyond the West, the archive details Soviet influence in India (described as a "playground" for agents) and the Middle East, showcasing the global scale of the Cold War intelligence war.
: Various historical and intelligence-focused repositories have worked to host high-quality PDF versions of the notes and the Churchill Archives Centre's catalog for academic research. mitrokhin archive pdf 2021
The resulting publications— The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way (2005)—co-authored with Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew, offered an unprecedented "view from the other side." As of 2021, the archive remains a touchstone for intelligence historians, serving not only as a record of KGB operations but as a case study in the methodology of intelligence defectors. : Beyond the West, the archive details Soviet
The "Mitrokhin Archive" refers to the collection of handwritten notes made by Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior archivist for the KGB, during his 30-year tenure. Smuggled out of Russia and brought to the UK in 1992, the archive resulted in two seminal books by historian Christopher Andrew: The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way (2005). The "Mitrokhin Archive" refers to the collection of
: Mitrokhin hid his notes daily in his shoes or clothes, eventually compiling them into six trunks buried beneath the floorboards of his family dacha.
University students can access the full-text PDF of The Sword and the Shield via JSTOR, ProQuest Ebook Central, or EBSCOhost. These are legal, scanned copies from the 2021 digital reprint by Penguin Books.
The archive covers a wide range of topics, including: