From investigative philology. Russian writers in Vasili Mitrokhin’s archive

Abstract

The paper discusses the question of names of famous Russian writers listed in the book entitled The Mitrokhin Archive. The book is a source of terrifying knowledge on the activities of the Soviet security services over the years 1918–1984. Vasili Mitrokhin, an employee of the Archives Department of the First Main Directorate of the Committee for State Security (KGB) under the USSR council of ministers, between 1956 and 1984 gathered notes from thousands of classified KGB documents and transferred them to the British special services. Not only do Mitrokhin’s notes reveal information on various intelligence operations carried out by USSR abroad, but they also expose the perfidy and violence showcased by the Soviet authorities towards those citizens who defied the totalitarian rule and human rights violation in the country. As can be concluded from the data collected in The Mitrokhin Archive, the KGB kept the Russian creative circles under heavy scrutiny and cynically persecuted those exceptional individuals whose creative output was deemed by the Kremlin as dangerous to the preservation of the Communist state. The book, which is the subject of this analysis, provides information – in various cultural and social contexts – on such writers (oftentimes dissidents as well) as Vladimir Bukovsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Yuli Daniel, Aleksandr Herzen, Vladimir Maksimov, Boris Pasternak, Andrei Sinyavsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aleksey Tolstoy and Leo Tolstoy.