Only utopians and revisionists believe that it was not the Soviet system and ideology that were flawed, but rather the practical policies of the USSR and particularly the horrors of Stalinism. But inhumanity, impracticality, and the inefficiencies of the system are obvious to anyone who can objectively observe historical facts. That is not to say that there weren't some great achievements in the USSR. In a broad context, it is clear that the Soviet system was never able to become a sustainable reality, terror and deception allowed the system to propagate itself. The notes secreted away from the archives and published in the West reveal some very important historical facts. The writing style is consistent, so my flagging interest at the midway point in the book was a result of my general lack of interest of the post-Stalin Cold War period. This book is very thorough, so be prepared for a long read. I suspect that I'll do little more than flip through a chapter or two, unless the structure and style turn out to be very different.Ī very interesting read for those interested in Russian or Cold War history or espionage. I now despair of what to do with the sequel, "The World Was Going Our Way," which now mocks me from my to-be-read shelf. I really believe that the way this book is edited and arranged, combined with its vast length, would cause perhaps a fourth of well-intentioned readers to abandon it before they complete it. Still, I doggedly slogged on, more at the prospect of picking up fascinating little espionage stories (which I frequently did) than out of some stubborn insistence on finishing what I'd started. By the time I had gotten halfway through the book, I was really sick of it, and found myself wishing, on every page, that I had a digest version of the thing, half the length, and arranged more chronologically. Undoubtedly this was done to underscore the credibility of the information, and to position the book as a reference source, but it quickly started to aggravate me, and made the sentences clumsy to read and digest. You'll find this criticism shallow, I suspect, but I was particularly off-put by the rendering (in brackets) of the multiple code names assigned to every character described in the book. ![]() Because of the organization (traversing the period of history detailed in Mitrokhin's archive not chronologically, but rather by adversary country or espionage method) I was constantly bouncing from decade to decade, and had difficulty in applying a timeline to what I was reading. ![]() More than its daunting 600 page length, it was the awkward pacing that continually tripped me up. Well, I don't "binge-read" anything, considering how methodically I read and how quickly I fall asleep when I finally make my way to bed, but getting through this book was an arduous slog. Because I've always been a fan of the espionage genre - both historical and fictional - I expected to binge-read this book, growing drunk on previously unavailable levels of detail and accuracy in real-life spy drama. The trove most assuredly has been of incalculable value to historians and western intelligence agencies. First of all, I'm filled with respect for the dedication it took for Vasili Mitrokhin to painstakingly copy thousands upon thousands of documents, as a KGB archivist, and secretly store them under his home.
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