Reddit mentions of Mitrokhin Archive II, The: The KGB and the World

The short answer is that the USSR achieved relatively little by way of high-level penetration of the Nazi state. They did have agents in Germany and occupied Europe, but they were typically relatively junior government or military officials or civilians. They didn't, for example, have any agents of the calibre of Kim Philby. You can argue a few different reasons for why that was so — a paucity of Soviet-sympathetic senior Nazi officials; or effective counterintelligence work by the Gestapo and Abwehr — but I think the most compelling reason is that the Soviet foreign intelligence services in the 1930s and early 1940s was in a state of constant flux.

The Soviet intelligence establishment was ravaged by Stalin's purges, and was only just starting to rebuild in 1940. The intelligence services of the time (the NKVD, NKGB and GRU) occupied a difficult role in the Stalinist state: their implicit mission was not to provide intelligence to inform the direction of state policy, but to provide intelligence which confirmed state policy.

Under Stalin, intelligence provided by their agents abroad was frequently ignored by the Politburo and the military leadership. I've written a bunch of answers about Soviet intelligence history, but to give a couple of examples which illustrate this: Stalin ignored warnings of an impending German invasion from the Sorge spy ring in Tokyo and other Soviet agents in the field, as well as from the British Secret Intelligence Service and GC&CS.

But even if the USSR wasn't always that adept at exploiting intelligence, its intelligence-gathering apparatus was impressive. Soviet signals intelligence (SIGINT) during the war left something to be desired, but the KGB and its predecessor agencies were very skilled human intelligence (HUMINT) operators — but the period up to and then during Second World War was where they honed the agent-running skills that would characterise their Cold War intelligence work.

The NKVD/NKGB and GRU had several productive agent rings operating in Nazi Germany immediately prior to and during the war. They also carried out extensive partisan/paramilitary operations behind German lines. The best known agent network is what intelligence historian Christopher Andrew describes as "the loosely coordinated GRU [military intelligence] illegal network linked to the NKVD Harnack and Schulze-Boysen groups," which the Gestapo codenamed Rote Kappelle (Red Orchestra).

The most prominent "musicians" were Arvid Harnack (CORSICAN), a civil servant in the German economic ministry and Harro Schulze-Boysen (STARSHINA), a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe's intelligence department. According to Andrew, at its height the Rote Kappelle had "117 agents: 48 in Germany, 35 in France, 17 in Belgium and 17 in Switzerland." By September 1942, the network had been largely wound up by the Gestapo, which used direction-finding technology to track and locate their radio transmissions over a period of months. Most of them were executed (with the general exception of those agents based in Switzerland.)

Ironically, some of the most active Soviet intelligence-gathering during the war took place in the US and UK.

For further reading, I always recommend the three histories of the KGB and its predecessor agencies written by Andrew, which together comprise the most comprehensive scholarship yet written on Soviet foreign intelligence:

• Christopher Andrew & Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (1990)
  
• Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (2000)
  
• Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (2005)

You can read more about the Mitrokhin files (concerning Israel) in this story: http://www.ynetnews.com/home/0,7340,L-13181,00.html

Or in the books written by Prof. Christopher Andrew in cooperation with Mitrokhin himsef: https://www.amazon.com/Sword-Shield-Mitrokhin-Archive-History/dp/0465003125/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476826988&sr=1-1&keywords=the+sword+and+the+shield+the+mitrokhin+archive
Or: https://www.amazon.com/Mitrokhin-Archive-II-KGB-World/dp/0713993596

> Mitrokhin Archives Volume 2: The KGB and the World

I really want to buy the book. But holy shit, Amazon lists it a 6,000 INR. Any other sources I could get it from ?

Source: http://www.amazon.in/Mitrokhin-Archive-II-KGB-World/dp/0713993596