Cold War Codicology: Manuscripts and Materiality in the KGB Archives

When Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin defected to the United Kingdom in 1992, he brought with him over 25,000 documents. A KGB officer for decades before his recruitment by British intelligence, Mitrokhin meticulously compiled these documents piece by piece and hid them under the floorboards of his dacha. Historians of the Cold War and the craft of intelligence often cite the Mitrokhin archive as the most exhaustive source for KGB operations. However, Mitrokhin’s documents, along with other publicly available KGB files, reveal more than the organization’s covert influence operations, attempts to infiltrate dissident movements, or the recruitment of human sources. This talk explores the KGB case files as material artifacts that shed valuable light on how the Soviet intelligence apparatus recorded, transmitted, annotated, and preserved information. These files were hand-copied, typed, transmitted manually and by cable, bound by hand, foliated and paginated and supplied with marginalia and interlinear corrections and gloss. Examining these artifacts as a pre-modernist, Hoffman argues that we must be paleographers, codicologists and historians of the book to truly appreciate these texts and metatexts, carefully stitched together by Lubyanka’s scribes. 

Nicholas Hoffman is a Senior Strategic Communications Officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). After receiving his PhD in English from the Ohio State University, he began work at DIA’s National Digital Exploitation and OSINT Center (NDOC) in 2022. He has received the DIA Director’s Team Award, a Director of National Intelligence Meritorious Team Citation, and an official Commendation from the United Kingdom’s Chief of Defence Intelligence. 

Co-sponsored by The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Department of English and the Humanities Institute.