" 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. The trove most assuredly has been of incalculable value to historians and western intelligence agencies. 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. 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. More than its daunting 600 page length, it was the awkward pacing that continually tripped me up. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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 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. "
— Marvin, 11/18/2013