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Everyone who was anyone in Russia was spied on – including Stalin

In 1972,Vasili Mitrokhin oversaw the transfer of thousands of documents in the KGB archives and secretly noted the atrocities they revealed - though Stalin’s file was mysteriously empty

7 June 2025

9:00 AM

7 June 2025

9:00 AM

The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB Gordon Corera

William Collins, pp.336, 25

Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB colonel smuggled out of Russia by MI6 in the early 1990s with a treasure trove of notes from the KGB’s archive. The resulting 3,500 CI reports (CI meaning counter-intelligence – information about hostile spies) identified 1,000 KGB agents around the world and were shared with 36 countries.

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