The Soviets bought India....

The Soviet Union was EVIL...

The documents paint a sordid picture of India's Cold War alliance with the Soviet Union: newspapers bankrolled by the KGB to plant thousands of articles and agents making midnight deliveries of suitcases full of cash to the prime minister's house.

It was a time, a KGB official said, when "the entire country was for sale."

The revelations, in a newly published book based on KGB archives, have embarrassed India's ruling Congress party — in power then and now — and provided a field day for the press.

"Indira's India was KGB playground," read the headline in India's Sunday Times, referring to then-prime minister Indira Gandhi. But analysts said the accounts, from a recently published book based on notes that KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin smuggled out of Moscow when he fled to Britain in 1992, are unlikely to have a major impact on current politics — with India now a firm U.S. ally.

Mitrokhin, who died last year at 82, took handwritten notes from thousands of top-secret documents while he was supervising the 10-year-long move of the KGB's foreign intelligence archives to a new site, according to his co-author, Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge University history professor.

The two chapters on India in The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World detail deep penetration of Gandhi's Congress-led government by the Soviet espionage agency.

Mitrokhin's notes describe how a senior New Delhi-based KGB operative, identified as Leonid Shebarshin, personally delivered millions of rupees to Gandhi's principal fundraiser in late-night meetings.

However, the book makes it clear Gandhi herself was not on the KGB payroll and probably had no idea of the source of her party's funds.

The spy agency also infiltrated the media. By 1972, the KGB had 10 Indian newspapers on its payroll and had planted 3,789 articles, many alluding to U.S. attempts at regional subversion, the book said.