The Sword and Shield of the Empire: An Uncensored History of the Soviet KGB

On a freezing night in Moscow, December 20, 1917, Vladimir Lenin signed a decree that would shape the geopolitical landscape of the twentieth century. Russia was in chaos, devoured by revolution, world war, and imminent civil strife. To defend the fragile Bolshevik revolution against internal enemies and foreign saboteurs, Lenin appointed a fanatical, ascetic Polish nobleman named Felix Dzerzhinsky to form a temporary security organ. It was named the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission—known simply by its Russian acronym, the Cheka.

That “temporary” organ did not dissolve when the emergency passed. Instead, it mutated over seven decades, changing its acronym six times before solidifying on March 13, 1954, into the most formidable intelligence and state-security apparatus in human history: the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security).

At its peak, the KGB was far more than an intelligence agency like the CIA or MI6. It was an all-encompassing empire within an empire: part foreign espionage network, part secret police, part border guard, part censor, and part political inquisitor. The story of the KGB is not merely a tale of trench coats, micro-cameras, and poison-tipped umbrellas; it is the story of how a totalitarian state constructed an ideological fortress to control the minds of its citizens and project power across the globe.

1. The Bloodlines of the Cheka: “Iron Felix” and the Red Terror (1917–1934)

To understand the KGB, one must first understand its ancestral spirit: the Cheka. Felix Dzerzhinsky, famously nicknamed “Iron Felix,” established the organization’s founding ethos. Dzerzhinsky was an unyielding zealot who spent years in Tsarist prisons and hard labor camps before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. He viewed state security not as a legal function, but as an existential holy war.

“The Cheka is not a court,” Dzerzhinsky declared in 1918. “The Cheka is the defense of the revolution… It must defend the revolution and conquer the enemy, even if its sword falls accidentally upon the heads of the innocent.”

Felix Dzerzhinsky, architect of the Cheka. Pictures from History / Pictures From History/Universal Images Group by Getty Images

Chronological Evolution of Soviet Secret Police Agencies
==================================================================
1917–1922 : Cheka   (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission)
1922–1923 : GPU     (State Political Directorate)
1923–1934 : OGPU    (Joint State Political Directorate)
1934–1946 : NKVD    (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs)
1946–1954 : MGB/MVD (Ministry of State Security / Internal Affairs)
1954–1991 : KGB     (Committee for State Security)
==================================================================

The Red Terror and the Birth of Extrajudicial Power

Following an assassination attempt on Vladimir Lenin by Fanya Kaplan on August 30, 1918, the Cheka unleashed the Red Terror. Standard legal procedure was tossed aside. Cheka operatives—known proudly as Chekists—were granted authority to execute suspected counter-revolutionaries, speculative traders, and class enemies without trial.

The Cheka established its headquarters at 2 Lubyanka Square in downtown Moscow, a grand neo-baroque building that formerly belonged to the All-Russia Insurance Company. Lubyanka soon became a terrifying symbol of Soviet power. Its basements were converted into interrogation cells and execution chambers, where thousands met their end.

Operation TRUST: The Masterpiece of Counter-Intelligence

Between 1921 and 1926, the secret police (then operating as the OGPU) pulled off one of the greatest deception operations in intelligence history: Operation TRUST.

Recognizing that monarchist émigrés in Paris and London were conspiring with Western intelligence agencies to overthrow the Bolsheviks, the OGPU created a fake anti-Bolshevik underground movement inside Russia called the Monarchist Union of Central Russia.

• The Entrapment: Western spies—including the legendary British agent Sidney Reilly (the “Ace of Spies”)—and Russian white émigrés were lured into the USSR, believing they were coordinating with a powerful internal resistance network.
• The Result: The Soviet secret police neutralized foreign intelligence gathering, monitored anti-Soviet networks across Western Europe, and executed or imprisoned key resistance leaders who sneaked into Russia.

Operation TRUST established a core Chekist operational principle that persisted through the KGB era: provocation, infiltration, and the total creation of false realities to trap opponents.

2. The Stalin Era: The NKVD, the Great Terror, and the Atomic Spies (1934–1953)

By the mid-1930s, Joseph Stalin had consolidated supreme power, transforming the secret police into an instrument of personal dictatorship. Under the banner of the NKVD (Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del), the secret police conducted a campaign of mass repression unparalleled in modern European history.

The Great Purge and the Reign of Executioners

Between 1936 and 1938, the Great Purge (or Yezhovshchina, named after NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov) tore through Soviet society. Stalin turned the NKVD inward, exterminating Old Bolsheviks, military commanders, intellectuals, and millions of ordinary citizens.

Key Chiefs of the Soviet Secret Police Under Stalin
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Leader             Term         Primary Role & Eventual Fate
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Genrikh Yagoda     1934–1936    Built early Gulag infrastructure; purged and executed in 1938.
Nikolai Yezhov     1936–1938    Executed the Great Terror; arrest & execution in 1940.
Lavrentiy Beria    1938–1953    Managed WWII intelligence & Atomic Bomb; executed in 1953.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The scale of repression was governed by bureaucratic quotas. NKVD Order No. 00447, issued on July 30, 1937, set specific targets for every region of the Soviet Union detailing how many people were to be shot (Category 1) or sent to the labor camps of the Gulag (Category 2). Regional NKVD bosses often sent frantic telegrams to Moscow asking for their execution quotas to be increased.

Nikolai Yezhov, a dwarf-like figure barely five feet tall, personally presided over late-night execution sessions at Lubyanka. Yet, in a stark illustration of the cannibalistic nature of Stalin’s apparatus, Yezhov was removed in 1938, replaced by the Georgian mastermind Lavrentiy Beria, and executed in 1940. Yezhov’s image was literally airbrushed out of official Soviet photographs—a metaphor for how the secret police edited reality itself.

The Cambridge Five and the Theft of the Atomic Secret

While the NKVD was terrorizing the home front, its foreign intelligence branch achieved astounding victories in the West. Operating on ideological recruitment rather than bribery, Soviet handlers recruited brilliant young intellectuals at Oxford and Cambridge Universities during the 1930s.

This network became known as the Cambridge Five:

1. Kim Philby: High-ranking officer in British Intelligence (MI6) who eventually became the liaison officer to the CIA in Washington.
2. Guy Burgess: BBC journalist and diplomat inside the British Foreign Office.
3. Donald Maclean: Senior diplomat who accessed top-secret atomic communications in Washington and London.
4. Anthony Blunt: Art advisor to King George VI and officer in MI5.
5. John Cairncross: Intelligence clerk who provided crucial intercepts from Bletchley Park.

Through the Cambridge Five and espionage networks inside the Manhattan Project—including physicist Klaus Fuchs and American engineer Theodore Hall—the Soviet Union obtained complete technical blueprints for the U.S. atomic bomb. When Stalin was discreetly informed about the successful Trinity nuclear test by President Harry Truman at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Stalin barely blinked. Thanks to NKVD foreign intelligence, Stalin already possessed detailed technical schematics of the weapon.

According to documents released in the U.S. National Archives, the decrypted Soviet diplomatic communications known as the VENONA Project revealed that hundreds of Western government officials, scientists, and journalists were actively passing intelligence to Moscow throughout World War II.

3. The Birth of the KGB: Post-Stalin Reform and Restructuring (1954–1964)

When Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, his political heirs lived in terror of one man: Lavrentiy Beria. Beria controlled the entire internal security infrastructure, the atomic bomb project, and the vast slave labor network of the Gulag. He was poised to seize total control of the Soviet Union.

In a dramatic coup engineered by Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Georgi Zhukov in June 1953, Beria was arrested during a Presidium meeting at the Kremlin. In December 1953, Beria was tried in secret and executed by a bullet to the forehead.

The Founding Decree of March 13, 1954

To prevent another Beria or Yezhov from ever using the secret police to terrorize the Communist Party leadership, the Soviet state radically restructured state security.

On March 13, 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet officially created the Committee for State Security—the KGB.

The key structural change was implied in its very name: it was a Committee attached to the Council of Ministers, not an independent Ministry.

• The Communist Party reserved absolute political control over the agency.
• Mass terror was discontinued. Arbitrary arrests of Party elites ceased.
• The KGB was transformed from a blunt sledgehammer into a surgical, highly educated scalpel.

Under its early chairmen, such as Ivan Serov (1954–1958) and Alexander Shelepin (1958–1961), the KGB recruited top university graduates, polyglots, mathematicians, and legal scholars. The agency sought to burnish its public image inside the USSR, casting Chekists as heroic, incorruptible guardians defending the Motherland against imperialist subversion.

4. Inside the Leviathan: Organization, Directorates, and Operational Tactics

At its peak in the 1970s and 1980s, the KGB was a vast bureaucratic monolith employing roughly 480,000 personnel—including border guards and uniformed security troops—backed by an estimated network of several million domestic informers.

The iconic Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow. Maksim Mikhailov / Getty Images

The Anatomy of the KGB Machine

The agency was divided into semi-autonomous departments known as Chief Directorates, each responsible for a specific theater of political and security warfare:

Organizational Hierarchy of the KGB
====================================================================================================
Directorate               Primary Mission & Area of Responsibility
====================================================================================================
First Chief Directorate   Foreign Intelligence, covert operations, espionage, espionage networks.
Second Chief Directorate  Domestic counter-intelligence, monitoring foreign tourists and diplomats.
Third Chief Directorate   Military counter-intelligence, surveillance of the Soviet Armed Forces.
Fourth Directorate        Transportation security and infrastructure protection.
Fifth Chief Directorate   Ideological counter-intelligence, suppression of dissidents and religion.
Eighth Chief Directorate  Communications, cryptography, signals intelligence (SIGINT), cybernetics.
Ninth Directorate         VIP security, personal protection of Kremlin leadership and nuclear assets.
Border Guard Directorate  Guarding the 60,000-km land and sea borders of the USSR (approx. 220,000 troops).
====================================================================================================

The First Chief Directorate (FCD): Foreign Intelligence and “Illegals”

Headquartered in a secluded ring-shaped building in Yasenevo, on the outskirts of Moscow, the First Chief Directorate managed foreign operations. The FCD classified its intelligence officers into two distinct categories:

1. Legals (Legal’ny): Intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover out of Soviet embassies, consulates, or trade delegations abroad (e.g., as press attachés or cultural officers).
2. Illegals (Nelegaly): The elite aristocrats of Soviet espionage. These officers operated under deep, assumed identities—often stealing the birth certificates of deceased infants in Western countries. They spoke fluent local languages, posed as native citizens, held no diplomatic immunity, and established espionage networks that could survive even if diplomatic ties were severed during war.

       [ Moscow Center (Yasenevo HQ) ]
                      │
       ┌──────────────┴──────────────┐
       ▼                             ▼
[ Legal Residentura ]       [ Illegal Operative ]
 - Diplomatic Cover           - Stolen Identity
 - Protected by Immunity      - No Diplomatic Ties
 - Stationed in Embassy       - Deep Cover in Target Society

The recruitment, training, and deployment of “Illegals” was managed by the secretive Department S within the First Chief Directorate.

Active Measures (Aktivnyye Meropriyatiya)

Espionage was only half of the First Chief Directorate’s mission. The other half was Active Measures—a blend of psychological warfare, disinformation, forgery, and political manipulation designed to weaken Western societies from within.

“Active measures is not intelligence gathering,” explained former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin. “It is subversion: weakening the West, driving wedges in Western alliances, destabilizing foreign governments, and confusing public opinion.”

Notable KGB Active Measures included:

• Operation INFEKTION (1980s): A brilliant disinformation campaign that planted stories in foreign news outlets claiming the HIV/AIDS virus was created by the U.S. military at Fort Detrick, Maryland, as a biological weapon. The story gained traction worldwide, appearing in newspapers across more than 80 countries.
• Forged State Department Documents: The KGB manufactured convincing fake memoranda signed by U.S. officials to damage relations between NATO allies and developing nations in Africa and Asia.
• Funding Front Organizations: The KGB covertly funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-nuclear groups, pacifist campaigns, and political movements in Western Europe to block the deployment of U.S. Pershing II missiles during the 1980s.

Spycraft and Technological Marvels

The KGB’s Technical Operations Directorate created gadgets that rivaled anything found in James Bond films:

• The Thing (1945–1952): A passive, cavity-resonator listening device concealed inside a hand-carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. Given to U.S. Ambassador Averell Harriman by Soviet schoolchildren, it hung unsuspected in the Ambassador’s Moscow study for seven years, beaming clear audio across the street whenever Soviet operators directed a radio signal at it.
• The Poison-Tip Umbrella (1978): Used in London to assassinate Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov. A KGB-designed pneumatic umbrella fired a tiny platinum-iridium pellet filled with ricin into the back of Markov’s leg as he walked across Waterloo Bridge.
• Lipstick Pistols and Micro-Cameras: Female covert agents were issued single-shot 4.5mm pistols disguised as lipstick tubes (“The Kiss of Death”), while eavesdropping teams used subminiature Minox cameras and micro-dot film transmitters.

5. Yuri Andropov and the War on Dissent (1967–1982)

In May 1967, a cerebral, cold-eyed diplomat named Yuri Andropov was appointed Chairman of the KGB. Andropov’s 15-year tenure would redefine the organization, elevating it to the pinnacle of political influence inside the Soviet Union.

Yuri Andropov, long-serving Chairman of the KGB. Bettmann / Bettmann Archive

The Fifth Chief Directorate: Crushing Ideological Subversion

Andropov understood that in an age of nuclear stalemate, the main threat to the Soviet Union was not NATO tanks, but Western ideas—free speech, rock music, human rights, and religious freedom.

In July 1967, Andropov established the Fifth Chief Directorate to combat “ideological subversion.” The Fifth Directorate hunted down samizdat publishers (underground political writings), Jewish refuseniks, nationalist movements in Ukraine and the Baltics, and human rights activists.

Rather than executing dissidents as Stalin had done, Andropov implemented subtle, insidious suppression tactics:

1. Punitive Psychiatry (Psikhushka): Dissidents like Vladimir Bukovsky were declared mentally ill, diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” (vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya)—a medical fiction invented by Soviet psychiatrists claiming that opposing communism was a sign of mental delusion. Dissidents were locked in psychiatric hospitals (Spez-psikhushki) and injected with debilitating psychoactive drugs.
2. Forced Exile: Prominent figures who possessed international reputations were stripped of citizenship and deported. Nobel laureate author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR in 1974, while nuclear physicist and human rights pioneer Andrei Sakharov was exiled to the closed city of Gorky in 1980.
3. Total Societal Surveillance: The KGB created an ubiquitous network of informants. Hotel clerks, taxi drivers, university professors, Intourist guides, and Orthodox priests were regularly recruited or coerced into filing reports on foreign visitors and domestic citizens.

The Golden Age of Moles: Hanssen, Ames, and Walker

During Andropov’s chairmanship and its immediate aftermath, the KGB scored its most damaging foreign counter-intelligence victories by recruiting high-placed walk-ins within the U.S. national security infrastructure:

• John Anthony Walker (US Navy): A Navy communications specialist who, starting in 1967, sold top-secret naval cryptographic keys to the KGB for 17 years. The intelligence allowed Moscow to decrypt over one million top-secret U.S. military messages, tracking U.S. nuclear submarine positions in real time.
• Aldrich Ames (CIA): Chief of the CIA’s Soviet counter-intelligence branch. Beginning in 1985, Ames sold the identities of virtually every CIA asset operating inside the Soviet Union for $4.6 million. His betrayals led to the arrest and execution of at least ten top-tier Western spies inside Lubyanka.
• Robert Hanssen (FBI): A senior FBI counter-intelligence agent who spied for the KGB (and later the FSB) from 1979 to 2001. Hanssen passed over 6,000 pages of classified documents detailing U.S. nuclear continuity-of-government plans, eavesdropping techniques, and double-agent rosters.

These penetrations were so catastrophic that U.S. intelligence officials initially refused to believe a single mole could cause such damage, suspecting instead that the KGB had broken their secure ciphers.

6. Debunking KGB Myths: Omniscience vs. Bureaucratic Reality

The KGB’s reputation for omnipotent brilliance was carefully cultivated both by its own propaganda apparatus and by Western intelligence agencies seeking larger congressional budgets. Historical research following the opening of Soviet archives—and documents made public via the Wilson Center Digital Archive

—reveals a far more nuanced picture.

Common Myth vs. Historical Reality
=========================================================================================================
Popular Myth                             Historical Reality
=========================================================================================================
The KGB was an omniscient, error-free   It was plagued by crippling bureaucracy, systemic corruption,
mastermind agency.                       and ideological reporting biases.
KGB officers were fanatical,             By the 1970s, officers were pragmatic, pragmatic cynics who
dogmatic Marxist zealots.               coveted Western luxuries and elite privilege.
The KGB operated completely              The Communist Party Politburo maintained strict, unyielding
independently of political control.      political oversight over all major KGB operations.
=========================================================================================================

The Ideological Echo Chamber

The KGB suffered from a severe structural flaw common to authoritarian intelligence services: reporting bias. Officers stationed in Washington, London, or Paris were reluctant to send raw analysis that contradicted official Marxist-Leninist ideology or the worldview of senior Politburo leaders.

• Operation RYAN (1981–1983): Terrified that President Ronald Reagan was planning a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov ordered the KGB and military intelligence (GRU) to launch Operation RYAN (Raketno-Yadernoye Napadeniye, or Nuclear Missile Attack).
• KGB officers abroad were ordered to count light bulbs burning late in Western government offices, track blood drive donations, and monitor church services for signs of war preparation.
• To satisfy Moscow Center, field officers fabricated or exaggerated signs of war panic, almost triggering a nuclear miscalculation during NATO’s Able Archer 83 military exercise in November 1983.

7. The Collapse of the Empire and the Fall of the Sword (1985–1991)

When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power as General Secretary in March 1985, he inherited a stagnant economy, a costly war in Afghanistan, and a demoralized society. Gorbachev introduced Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) to modernize Soviet communism.

For the KGB, Glasnost was a slow-motion catastrophe. As censorship relaxed, official Soviet history fractured. Independent journalists exposed the horrors of the Stalinist purges, the existence of secret Gulag graves, and the corruption of Soviet elites. The KGB lost its monopoly over information.

Timeline of the KGB's Final Years
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date              Event
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 1985        Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary; initiates Perestroika.
October 1988      Hardliner Vladimir Kryuchkov appointed Chairman of the KGB.
August 18, 1991   KGB Chairman Kryuchkov leads the GKChP hardline coup against Gorbachev.
August 21, 1991   The August Coup collapses due to public resistance and military defection.
August 22, 1991   Protesters topple the statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky outside Lubyanka.
December 3, 1991  The KGB is officially dissolved by the Soviet government.
December 25, 1991 The USSR formally dissolves; Russian security reorganizes into FSB/SVR.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The August Coup of 1991: The KGB’s Final Gamble

By August 1991, hardline elements within the Soviet leadership realized that Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty would effectively dissolve the central Soviet state.

On August 18, 1991, KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, along with Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov and Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov, launched a military coup d’état. They placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his summer dacha in Foros, Crimea, and formed the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP).

KGB special forces—including the elite Alfa Group (Spetsgruppa A)—were ordered to storm the Russian White House in Moscow and arrest Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

[ KGB Hardliners / Kryuchkov ] ──► Launch August 1991 Coup ──► Arrest Gorbachev in Crimea
                                                                     │
                                                                     ▼
[ Alfa Group / Military ] ◄── Refuse Orders to Storm Parliament ◄─── ORDERED TO ARREST YELTSIN
           │
           ▼
[ Public Resistance / Yeltsin ] ──► Coup Collapses ──► Statue of Dzerzhinsky Toppled (Aug 22)

The coup failed for three decisive reasons:

1. Insubordination within the KGB: Senior commanders of Alfa Group and Vympel inspected Yeltsin’s defenses and refused to launch the assault, realizing it would cost hundreds of civilian lives.
2. Public Resistance: Tens of thousands of ordinary Muscovites poured into the streets, building barricades around the Russian Parliament building.
3. Loss of Nerve: The elderly coup leaders lacked the ruthlessness of their Chekist predecessors. During press conferences, their hands trembled visibly on national television.

The Falling of the Sword

The coup collapsed within 72 hours. On the night of August 22, 1991, a jubilant crowd gathered in front of the KGB headquarters at Lubyanka Square. Using a heavy crane, protesters hooked cables around the neck of the 15-ton bronze statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky that had stood sentry over the square since 1958, hoisting it into the air to thunderous applause.

On December 3, 1991, three weeks before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, the KGB was officially abolished by Soviet Law No. 124-N.

8. The Shadow Legacy: From KGB to FSB and Beyond

The destruction of the KGB was more administrative than fundamental. While the Soviet Union vanished from world maps on December 25, 1991, the institutional knowledge, operational files, and personnel of the KGB did not disappear into thin air.

The giant committee was fractured into separate, streamlined Russian domestic and foreign intelligence agencies:

• FSB (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti): Federal Security Service, responsible for domestic security, counter-intelligence, border control, and surveillance (inheriting the functions of the Second, Third, and Fifth Chief Directorates).
• SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki): Foreign Intelligence Service, taking over the international espionage network of the First Chief Directorate.
• FSO (Federalnaya Sluzhba Okhrany): Federal Protective Service, taking over the VIP security duties of the Ninth Directorate.

In the chaotic post-Soviet 1990s, former Chekists—known collectively as the Siloviki (men of force)—transitioned from state intelligence into private security, state corporations, banking, and politics. By the turn of the 21st century, veterans who had earned their stripes in the corridors of Lubyanka and Yasenevo rose to occupy the highest political offices in the Russian Federation.

The organizational methods forged by Dzerzhinsky, refined by Beria, and modernized by Andropov—the strategic deployment of Active Measures, state surveillance, deep-cover operations, and foreign influence operations—remain foundational elements of global intelligence history and modern geopolitics.

9. Conclusion

The KGB was a monumental anomaly in the history of global intelligence agencies. It was never merely an espionage service serving a state; it was the structural skeleton and ideological armor that sustained the Soviet superpower for nearly four decades. From the bloody executions in Lubyanka basements under Stalin to the subtle psychological coercion of dissidents under Andropov, the Committee for State Security proved that a regime can maintain absolute control over a vast empire if it controls the flow of information, enforces ideological orthodoxy, and projects fear.

Yet, the ultimate irony of the KGB’s history lies in its final act. Created to protect the Soviet state from subversion, its own leadership precipitated the empire’s collapse in August 1991 through a desperate, ill-conceived coup attempt. As the bronze statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky was lifted off its pedestal into the night sky above Lubyanka, it signaled not just the end of an agency, but the conclusion of one of the most ambitious, terrifying, and captivating chapters in the history of human power.

Further Reading & Primary Sources

For historical research, primary archive collections, and academic analyses regarding the history of the KGB and Soviet state security, consult the following resources:

• Wilson Center Digital Archive: Features extensive translated primary documents from the KGB archives, Cold War international history project files, and secret Politburo minutes.
• U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): Hosts declassified intelligence files regarding the VENONA project, Cold War intelligence leaks, and counter-espionage records.
• Central Intelligence Agency FOIA Reading Room: Offers declassified CIA estimates, operational reports, and analytical studies on the KGB First Chief Directorate and Soviet Active Measures.
• The British Library Special Collections: Contains manuscripts, personal memoirs, and primary diplomatic documentation detailing Soviet espionage operations across Europe.
• The Mitrokhin Archive (Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge University): The definitive primary source collection smuggled out of Russia by senior KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, containing thousands of secret KGB operational files spanning 1917 to 1984.