History is a bad keeper of secrets. It is also indifferent to human embarrassment. The extraordinary archival material made public by a Soviet dissident intelligence officer and now a defector living in Britain, Mr Vasili Mitrokhin, has been creating some turmoil in the first as well as the third worlds. Mr Mitrokhin had managed to smuggle out, between the early Seventies and the mid-Eighties, piles of documentation from one of the world?s most secret and closely guarded archives ? that of the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB. The FCD?s records ? interpreted by a Cambridge historian, Mr Christopher Andrew ? have established, more extensively than before, the role of the KGB in the third world, which the KGB believed to be the arena where the Cold War could be won. The Mitrokhin archives reveal that in the early Seventies, the FCD regarded India as ?a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World government?with scores of sources throughout the Indian government ? in intelligence, counter-intelligence, the Defence and Foreign Ministries, and the police?. These ?sources? have now been identified, and the work of Messrs Mitrokhin and Andrew implicates the most hallowed names in the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), together with a few famous ones in the media, from the mid-Fifties until the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Indian stories are fairly sordid, speaking of greed, corruption and gullibility in the highest places. Hence the chagrin in both Congress and Left circles. It must be understood that this is not a ?media campaign?, but a piece of serious historical research based on authentic archives, the refutation of which must be considerably more substantial than mere angry denial and dismissal. Moreover, these are records kept by the KGB, sent in by its various agents and ?residencies?, with their own ideological and self-serving stakes in gathering and documenting such intelligence ? especially the Soviet need to believe in its own political influence in the third world, given the equally ubiquitous presence of its adversary, the CIA. Yet, what the documents reveal will have to be taken on board, and the last thing that the Congress and the CPI(M) ought to be giving the impression of is that of an embarrassed cover-up. A genuine inquiry ? founded on scrupulous historical methods rather than political damage control ? is what any conscientious government owes its citizens in the face of such disclosures.