Sorge was also brave. Whether it was snatching photographs of secret documents when left alone for a few minutes in the German ambassador’s study, or lying terribly injured in hospital after a drunken motorcycle wreck, but fighting to hold on to consciousness until a friend could arrive to recover incriminating documents from his jacket pocket, Sorge maintained an almost supernatural cool. He always thought of himself as a soldier, from his teenage years in the service of the Kaiser in the trenches of the First World War to his last moments on the gallows, when he stood to attention and saluted the Red Army and the Soviet Communist Party. For all his drunken indiscretions, he always lived a life of furious activity, rising early and spending hours every day writing, reading and spying. He was an officer and a professional, even when drunk, even in despair. And in some ways he was also a gentleman. In prison he refused to discuss the women in his life and never mentioned his long-standing Japanese mistress to his interrogators. The prosecutor who questioned him described Sorge as ‘the greatest man I have ever met’.
Sorge was also an intellectual of sorts. He certainly had at least a robust and competent intelligence. He wrote in his prison memoir that in peaceful times he would have been a scholar. He lived his life as the principal actor in a one-man show whose real audience was unknown to its physical spectators – his nearly always remote spymasters in the Fourth Directorate of the Red Army’s General Staff. It was Sorge’s tragedy that for the most crucial part of his career they doubted his loyalty and thought him a traitor – though he himself mercifully never knew that the brilliant intelligence that he supplied was often scorned and discounted.
The last word, before we embark on the story of Sorge’s extraordinary life, belongs to John le Carré, who wrote a brilliant review of the first book to appear in Britain on the Sorge case in 1966.1 Le Carré, who had spent time among the denizens of the shadow world, understood Sorge better than most. ‘He was a comedian in the sense of Graham Greene, an artist in the sense of Thomas Mann,’ wrote le Carré:
Like Spinell in Thomas Mann’s Tristan he is always working at an unfinished book. It was at his bedside, together with an open volume of 11th-century Japanese verse, at the time of his arrest. He played the Bohemian, keeping a pet owl in a cage in his room, drinking and whoring his way to triumph. He was an entertainer; people (even his victims) loved him; soldiers warmed to him immediately. He was a man’s man, and like most self-appointed romantics, had no use for women outside the bedroom. He was an exhibitionist, I suspect, and the audience was always of his own sex. He had courage, great courage, and a romantic’s sense of mission: when his colleagues were arrested he lay in bed drinking sake, waiting for the end. He wanted to train as a singer; he is not the first spy to be recruited from the ranks of failed artists. A French journalist describes him as possessing a ‘strange combination of charm and brutality’. At times, he undoubtedly betrayed the symptoms of an alcoholic. These then are the characteristics he brought to spying. What did spying give to him? A stage I think; a ship to sail upon his own romantic seas; a string to tie together a bundle of middle-range talents; a fool’s bladder with which to beat society; and a Marxist whip with which to scourge himself. This sensual priest had found his real métier; he was born wonderfully in his own century. Only his Gods were out of date.2
1
‘From the Schoolhouse to the Slaughter Block’
‘They integrated you with imperial ambitions and then let you loose into the world with a sense of elitism – but with your heart frozen. When you’ve become that frozen child, but you’re an outwardly functioning, charming chap, there is a lot of wasteland inside you that is waiting to be cultivated’1
John le Carré
Richard Sorge was born in 1895 in Baku, the Russian Empire’s wealthiest, most corrupt and most violent city. For centuries oil and gas had been bubbling naturally up from the ground in the marshy lowlands along the Caspian Sea, busting spontaneously into flame and inspiring fear and worship. But it was a couple of Swedish brothers, Ludwig and Robert Nobel, who transformed this acrid-smelling backwater into a great oil boomtown when their drills hit Baku’s first gusher in 1879. The resulting fountain of wealth drew workers, architects and merchants from all over Russia – as well as a boomtown’s compliment of prostitutes, revolutionaries and chancers. Baku, in the words of one of its most famous residents, Iosif Stalin, fast became a city of ‘debauchery, despotism and extravagance’ for the wealthy.2 For the working class who toiled in the notoriously unhealthy oil-company shanties, it was a twilight zone of ‘smoke and gloom’.3 Baku’s own governor called it ‘the most dangerous place in Russia’. For the firebrand young writer Maxim Gorky, ‘the oil wells of Baku left the impression of a painting of hell’.4
Hell it may have been, but Baku was an infernal region that spouted money. Foreign oilmen, attracted by high wages and lucrative stakes in the fast-proliferating oil companies, flocked to the smoky Caspian city.5 One of them was Wilhelm Richard Sorge, a drilling engineer from the small Saxon town of Wettin am Saale. He arrived in Baku in 1882 at the age of thirty-one, having spent several years in the oilfields of Pennsylvania. Sorge was hired by the Caucasian Oil Company, a Nobel subsidiary.6 Another fortune seeker was the merchant Semyon Kobolev, who relocated from Kiev to take advantage of Baku’s burgeoning business opportunities. His daughter Nina was born in Baku.7 In 1885, at the age of eighteen, she met and married Wilhelm Sorge.8 Their union of oil and commerce was a match made in a particularly capitalist inferno.
Baku’s backstreets, where the workers of the Nobel and Rothschild companies lived, were ‘littered with decaying rubbish, disembowelled dogs, rotten meat, faeces’.9 The city literally choked on its own effluent. ‘The oil seeped everywhere,’ recalled Anna Alliluyeva, who lived there a decade later with her revolutionary son-in-law Iosif Stalin. ‘Trees couldn’t grow in this poisonous atmosphere.’10 However the Sorge family, like well-to-do expatriates of later generations, managed to stay well clear of the filth, violence and nascent revolutionary fervour of Moscow’s German residents. They rented a handsome two-storey brick villa in the prosperous suburb of Sabunçi, to the north-west of the city. Downtown Baku may have been, as the novelist Essad Bey wrote, ‘not unlike the Wild West, teeming with bandits and robbers’.11 But Sabunçi was a haven of middle-class respectability, with wide acacia-lined streets that were soon to boast the town’s first electric tram line. The Sorges’ house still stands, now a dilapidated slum inhabited by ten refugee families. The grounds are now a maze of jerry-built shacks housing dismembered motorcycles and noisy chickens.
A group photograph taken in 1896 shows the Sorges as an ideal bourgeois German family. Paterfamilias Wilhelm Sorge, bearded and frock-coated, leans magisterially on a bannister. His five surviving children (five more died in infancy12) are arranged in matching dark suits on steps leading down to a garden where rugs have been laid out on the lawn for the occasion. The eight-month-old Richard is perched on a wooden flower-pot stand, steadied from behind by his mother and surrounded by a huddle of servant women in plain frocks.
Sorge made no mention of his mother in an autobiographical confession written in a Japanese prison in 1942, except to note her Russian nationality. Certainly, it seems that Nina Sorge spoke to her sons in German rather than her native Russian, making young Richard twice a stranger – secluded from both the teeming oriental life of Azeri-speaking Baku and from the Russian colonial elite of the city. When Sorge later moved to Moscow he had to learn his Russian mother tongue from scratch.13
Wilhelm Sorge was ‘unmistakably a nationalist and imperialist … unable to shake off the impression made upon his youth by the building of the German Empire during the War of 1870–71’, Sorge wrote in his prison memoir. ‘He was strongly conscious of the property he had amassed and the social position he had achieved abroad.’14
Yet despite Wilhelm’s stern Prussian patriotism, a spirit of rebellion seems to have run strong in the Sorge family. Richard’s paternal great-uncle, Fr
iedrich Adolf Sorge, had joined an armed rebellion against the Saxon authorities in 1848, and in the wake of the revolution’s failure emigrated to America in 1852.15 He became a passionate communist and served as secretary general of the International Workingmen’s Association – better known as the First International – when it moved to New York in the 1870s. He also corresponded extensively with his fellow German exiles in London, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.16
For the Sorge children growing up in Baku, ‘home’ was a Germany which they had never seen. Perhaps it was Sorge’s insular expatriate upbringing that helped to sow a lifetime’s sense of otherness in him. Wilhelm Sorge moved the family back to Berlin when Richard was four years old. A Russian connection remained, as Sorge senior worked in a German bank involved in the import of Caspian naphtha from Baku. But Richard clearly never felt fully at home in his new fatherland. ‘What made my life different from the average was a strong awareness of the fact that I had been born in the southern Caucasus,’ he wrote in his prison confession. ‘Our home also differed immensely in many respects from that of the average bourgeois family in Berlin.’ The Sorge family’s half-foreignness and the ‘peculiarities’ of their expatriate past made ‘all my brothers and sisters slightly different from the average school child’.17
The Sorges settled in the prosperous Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde ‘amid the comparative calm common to the wealthy bourgeois class’.18 By his own account, at school Richard was a difficult but brilliant pupil who ‘defied the school’s regulations, was obstinate and wilful and rarely opened my mouth’.19 He told his Japanese interrogators that he had been ‘far above the rest of the class … in history, literature, philosophy, political science’ and boasted of his athletic prowess. He dreamed, he told his captors, of becoming an Olympic high-jumper. By the age of fifteen the young Sorge had developed an avid interest in Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Kant ‘and other difficult authors’. In later life Sorge would often speak of himself as a ‘gypsy-scholar’ or a ‘robber-baron’, both characters from German Romantic poetry. Schiller’s The Robbers, the tale of a Robin Hood-like hero who robs the rich and protects the poor, was a particular favourite.20
On his death in 1911 Wilhelm Sorge left all his children with comfortable private incomes. ‘Economic worries had no place’ in the Sorge home.21 Young Richard grew more serious, taking a particular interest in history and politics. ‘I knew Germany’s current problems better than the average grown-up,’ he explained to the Japanese. ‘At school I was known as “Prime Minister”.’ It says something about his self-regard that Sorge, even in middle age, apparently saw no possible irony in his schoolboy nickname. His teachers found him talented but lazy, and a show-off.22 He joined the Wandervögel – ‘The Travelling Bird’ – a patriotic, sentimental youth group that organised camping and hiking holidays for clean-living young men and women of the German Empire – though Sorge would later describe it as ‘a workers’ athletic association’. It was while on a Wandervögel camping trip to Sweden in August 1914 that the news broke that Germany was at war.
The boys, in a fervour to come to their country’s call, hurried to catch the last steamer home. On 11 August, without consulting his mother, reporting back to school or taking his final high-school graduation exam, Sorge presented himself at a Berlin recruiting office and signed up for the German Imperial Army as a private soldier. ‘I was impelled to make this decision by a strong urge to seek new experiences, a desire to liberate myself from school studies and what I considered the whole meaningless and purposeless pattern of living of an 18-year-old,’ he wrote – adding, perhaps more honestly, that he had been caught up in the ‘general outburst of excitement created by the war’.23 The shadow of his late father’s stern patriotism must also have played a part.
Sorge was assigned to the student battalion of the Third Guards Field Artillery Regiment,24 and was given, again by his own account, ‘a completely inadequate six-week training course at a drill ground in the outskirts of Berlin’. At the end of September, he and his ill-trained fellows were shipped out to the River Yser in Belgium, where they faced British and Belgian regulars stubbornly holding prepared positions. Glowing with naive enthusiasm, Sorge’s student battalion went over the top for the first time on 11 November at Dixmude, south of Ypres, and was massacred. Any illusions Sorge may have had about the romance of war were shredded along with most of his comrades on his first day of action. ‘This period may be described as “from the schoolhouse to the slaughter block”,’25 Sorge later recalled with palpable bitterness.
The German survivors of that angry and deluded generation of 1914 would later describe the bloodshed of the Western front as the Kindermord – the massacre of the innocents. The experience ‘stirred up the first and most serious psychological unrest in the hearts of my comrades and myself … after our thirst for battle and adventure had been glutted, several months of silent and pensive emptiness began’.26
Like many of his class and generation, Sorge’s experience of war was profoundly formative, and shocking. Sorge, the bright young contrarian, found his reason beginning to rebel against the pointlessness of the conflict. ‘I mused over my knowledge of history and realised … how meaningless these oft-repeated wars were. My political curiosity led me to wonder what motives under lay this new war of aggression. Whose desire was it to capture this objective at the sacrifice of life?’27
For the first time in his young life, the gymnasium student and banker’s son Sorge found himself side by side with genuine members of the proletariat. But to his apparent surprise, his ‘simple soldier friends’ seemed to have no interest in examining the root causes of the conflict in which they found themselves the fodder for cannons. ‘Nobody knew the real purpose of the war, not to speak of its deep-seated significance. None of them even understood the meaning of our efforts. Most of the soldiers were middle-aged men, workers, and handicraftsmen by trade. Almost all of them belonged to industrial unions, and many were Social Democrats.’ He found only one ‘real leftist, an old stonemason from Hamburg, who refused to talk to anybody about his political beliefs’.28 They became close friends. Perhaps Sorge found in him an alternative father figure. The older mason told his young protégé of his life in Hamburg and of the persecution and unemployment he had suffered. Growing up in a world of unquestioning patriotism, this was the first pacifist Sorge had ever met. Their friendship was cut short when the old socialist was killed in action in early 1915.
A few months later it was Sorge’s turn to stop enemy steel. His unit had been transferred to Galicia, on the border of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in June 1915. For the first time he found himself fighting for his fatherland against his motherland. In July, Sorge caught a piece of Russian shrapnel in his right leg. He was sent to recover in the Lazarett Lankwitz military hospital in Berlin. A photograph taken at the time shows Sorge standing arm-in-arm with a young bespectacled cousin and friend, Erich Correns (later a distinguished chemist and East German politician). Sorge holds a cigar in his right hand and turns to his comrade, as Correns grins. Despite the Iron Cross medal ribbon on the breast of Correns’s tunic, the two of them look like the young schoolboys that they so recently were.29
Sorge used his convalescence at Lazarett Lankwitz finally to take his school leaving certificate. He passed with top marks. He also enrolled in Berlin University’s department of medicine and began attending lectures. But the Germany to which he had returned was very different from the one he had left. ‘Money could buy anything on the black market. The poor were irate. The initial excitement and spirit of sacrifice apparently no longer existed. Wartime profiteering and surreptitious buying and selling were beginning to appear, and the lofty ideals underlying the war were receding farther and farther into the background. In contrast, the material objectives of the struggle were gaining increasing prominence, and a thoroughly imperialistic goal, the elimination of war in Europe through the establishment of German hegemony, was being publicised.’30
Sorge was ‘not very happy in Germany and at a loss as to what to do’.31 Alienated from the corruption of civilian life, he chose to return to the only adult world he had ever felt comfortable in – the comradeship of the trenches. He volunteered to rejoin his unit before his official convalescence period was up. German-led offensives in Gorlice-Tarnów in Galicia – the borderlands between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires – and in the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia in the summer of 1915 had pushed the Russian Army back hundreds of miles behind the pre-war border. However, when Sorge returned to his regiment he found that most of his old friends had paid for the advance with their lives. Those who survived were deeply war-weary. ‘All the men dreamed of peace in their spare moments. The fact that, although we had already pierced deep into the heart of Russia, there was still no end in sight, made some of them begin to fear that the war would go on forever.’32
Wounded again in early 1916, Sorge found Berlin slipping ever deeper into the grip of ‘reaction and imperialism’. He ‘became convinced that Germany was unable to provide the world with … new ideas’. But though his revolutionary consciousness may have been awakened, the twenty-one-year-old Sorge nonetheless volunteered to return once more to his regiment on the Eastern front. ‘I felt that I would be better off fighting in a foreign land than sinking deeper into the mud at home.’33
Fighting deep inside the territory of the Russian Empire, Sorge met some true communists for the first time – two soldiers who were in contact with radical political groups in Germany who frequently talked of the radical German leftist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Socialism, they told Sorge, offered a way to ‘eliminate the causes of all this meaningless self-destruction and endless repetition of war … What was important to us was a broad solution, a permanent answer on an international scale.’34
An Impeccable Spy Page 2