The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) ceased to exist in 1991. In 1992, Vasili Mitrokhin, the archivist of the KGB, defected to the United Kingdom. He brought with him the KGB archives. Based on the archives, the official historian of British intelligence agency, Christopher Andrew and Mitrokhin collaborated and produced two books: Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005). The second book contains a separate chapter on India. Two exclusive chapters in the book (17 and 18) titled "The Special Relationship with India" deal with the KGB operations in India.

Nehru Period- (1947-1964)

According to Mitrokhin archives revelations, India was where the KGB "concentrated most of its operational effort during the Cold War”. While Nehru supported the move, the Soviet Union officially saw Gandhi as "a reactionary... who betrayed the people and helped the imperialists against them; aped the ascetics; pretended in a demagogic way to be a supporter of Indian independence ... and widely exploited religious prejudice”. Nehru was not bothered about what they thought about Gandhi. Further, he underestimated the intelligence capabilities of USSR, either intentionally or ignorantly.

According to Mitrokhin, Nehru laughed out loud when warned about the USSR urging the Indian communists to overthrow his government and remarked that “Moscow apparently did not know how smart our intelligence was”.

However, the archives show that KGB already had penetrated deeply into the Indian establishment "using its usual varieties of the honey trap”. What comes out is that in 1950s and 1960s there was a ‘war’ between Indian Intelligence Bureau (IB) and KGB right in the Indian political scenario. The KGB was uncovering the IB penetration in the Communist Party of India (CPI). As KGB started fortifying CPI with money and other inputs, IB penetration became increasingly difficult. The KGB created import-export businesses to Soviet bloc countries for the comrades. “The Soviet news agency Novosti provided further subsidies by routinely paying the CPI publishing house at a rate 50 per cent above its normal charges,” informs the book, and we Indians know too well the extent to which this operation was conducted all over the country. Nehru was already fast gravitating towards the USSR, making India almost a Soviet ‘satellite’. For example, Nehru government voted "against a UN resolution calling for free elections in Hungary and the withdrawal of Soviet forces”.