Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin was a Soviet intelligence officer who first began work for his country’s security services in the late 1940s.  During the 1950s, he was sent on various overseas missions; but he was apparently ill-suited to field work, and was reassigned to a desk job as an archivist. 

In this position, he had the ability to pore over the vast chronicles of the KGB’s global intelligence operations.  His foreign travels in the West had planted in him festering seeds of doubt about the Soviet system; but it was his systematic study of KGB activities dating from the Russian Revolution that stirred in him a righteous and implacable anger.  He began to believe that his position had conferred on him a duty to the Russian people to document for posterity the repressions, subversions, killings, manipulations, and other atrocities committed by the security services.  In 1972 he began to compose detailed notes of nearly everything that came across his desk; these notes were then smuggled out of his office, collated, and typed into coherent form by Mitrokhin in his home at night.

For over ten years, Mitrokhin persisted in his task.  His archives, secreted under the floor of his dacha, grew to fill thousands of pages.  He proceeded despite the extremely dangerous nature of his work; detection by his colleagues, or betrayal by a family member, would have at a minimum condemned him to many years in the gulag.  Yet he never faltered, and never wavered.  His task was too important.  Posterity was owed an accounting, and he had begun to see himself as the agent of this reckoning.  While on active duty, he made no attempt to contact foreign intelligence services; but after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, he made some tentative overtures. 

Initial results were not encouraging.  In 1991 he traveled to Riga in Latvia, and walked into the U.S. embassy, announcing himself as the bearer of a unique cache of information.  He showed samples of his archive to American intelligence officers, but they were unable to grasp the importance of what they saw.  He had better luck with the British.  In the chaotic years of the early 1990s, a window of opportunity opened for British intelligence to evacuate Mitrokhin, his family, and his entire 25,000-page archive.  His extensive debriefing in London established the authenticity of his materials beyond any doubt.

Christopher Andrew’s The Sword and the Shield:  The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (1999) is one of several books published from the treasure trove of Mitrokhin’s notes.  There is a profound passage in the introduction that caught my attention.  Mr. Andrew reflects on the difficulty many people in the West have in trying to comprehend the life and labors of a man like Mitrokhin:

The chief problem in understanding both Mitrokhin and his archive…is that neither is truly comprehensible in Western terms.  The very notion of the hero, familiar to all other cultures and all previous Western generations, arouses greater scepticism in the early twenty-first century West than at any other time or place in recorded history.  For those whose imaginations have been corroded by the cynicism of the age, the idea that Mitrokhin was willing to risk his life for twenty years for a cause in which he passionately believed is almost too difficult to grasp.  Almost equally hard to comprehend is Mitrokhin’s willingness to devote himself throughout that period to compiling and preserving a secret archive which he knew might never see the light of day.  For any Western author it is almost impossible to understand how a writer could devote all his or her energy and creative talent for many years to secret writing which might never be publicly revealed.  Yet…some of the greatest Russian writers of the Soviet era did precisely that.  No biography of any Western writer contains any death-bed scene comparable to the description by the widow of Mikhail Bulgakov of how she helped him out of bed for the last time so that he could satisfy himself before he died that his great, unpublished masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, arguably the greatest novel of the twentieth century, was still in its hiding place.  The Master and Margarita survived to be published a quarter of a century later.  It is a sobering thought, however, that for every forbidden masterpiece of the Soviet era which survives, there must be a larger number which have failed to survive or which, even now, are mouldering in their forgotten hiding places—as the Mitrokhin archive might well have done if Mitrokhin and SIS had not succeeded in removing it to Britain.  [p. xxix, 2001 ed.]    

These words have the ring of disconcerting truth.  For populations living within the penumbra of authoritarian systems, courage usually takes place behind closed doors, in the shadows, and there is no guarantee that such heroism will even be recognized, let alone rewarded.  So it was with the chief protagonist in the classic 2006 film The Lives of Others.  The ruthlessly efficient Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler experiences the stirrings of a long-repressed conscience when he encounters the writings of a dissident playwright.  This prompts him to sacrifice his own future by carrying out a heroic series of actions to save the writer’s life.  And all of this was done with the awareness that the writer would never even know Wiesler’s name, nor how he was rescued by this anonymous stranger. 

One thinks that there must be thousands of men like Wiesler in our midst, men working patiently and hopefully in the cause of virtue, their gaze fixed on the vindication of futurity, laboring with scant regard for profit or fame, undeterred in the knowledge that they may never be recognized.  Such power is wielded by greatness of soul!  Against this greatness we contrast the meanness and baseness of our own era’s values.  Attention seeking, notoriety, crudity, and provocation have come to be seen as substitutes for courage.  Heroism and the hard demands of virtue have become burdens too heavy for the narrow shoulders of our era’s men to bear; instead, they take refuge in the pleasures of notoriety, bombast, and poor taste. 

The rhetorician Quintilian had a word for this:  cacozelia, which may approximately be translated as bad taste.  But it is much more than just this, for there is a moral dimension to it.  It is a blend of poor taste and moral corruption that has no precise equivalent in English.  He describes the word as follows:

Cacozelia, that is, evil affectation, commits a moral offense in every type of speaking.  The same designation includes the bloated, the frivolous, the luxurious, the superfluous, the implausible, and the excessive.  Finally, what is called cacozelia is that which is outside of virtue—whenever  one’s nature is without judgment and is tricked by the dishonest appearance of good.  Of all the vices of rhetoric, it is the worst, for the others are insufficiently avoided, while this one is sought out.  [VIII.3.56]

Under this definition we can interpret cacozelia as a kind of fraud: a false appearance of virtue that seduces the minds of the weak.  Those with natures lacking good judgment, those “tricked by the dishonest appearance of good,” will be especially susceptible to this species of moral corruption, so astutely noted by Quintilian.  It is unsurprising that such individuals are unable to grasp the quiet, patient type of heroism exemplified by a man like Mitrokhin:  it is simply beyond their comprehension. 

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Take a look at the new, annotated translation of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods.