It was at this time that the German Communist Party formed its secret military wing, known as the M-Apparat, whose purpose was to prepare for the civil war the communists believed was impending in Germany, and to liquidate opponents and informers who might have infiltrated the party.22 It is not clear how closely Sorge was affiliated with these fighting communists – though he would later boast to friends in Moscow about his running battles with reactionaries on the streets of Aachen and Solingen. In his later prison statement, he would change his tune, casting himself as an intellectual and organiser rather than a fighter and brawler.
The right-wing Kapp Putsch soon collapsed under the pressure of the general strike, which was supported by some twelve million workers across Germany. The Ruhr Red Army occupied Dortmund, Essen and Hagen by force, disarming government troops and declaring the sovereignty of workers’ committees. By the end of March the entire Ruhr was in the hands of the rebels – though the uprising had no common leadership nor a common political programme. The restored SPD government, confronted with an armed uprising in Germany’s heartland far larger than the Spartacist revolt had ever been, resorted to the same tactics as Noske had employed in 1919. Both the regular army and the Freikorps were mobilised to crush the communists, summarily executing rebels. By 5 April 1920, over a thousand socialists had been killed and the remnants of the Ruhr Red Army fled across the Rhine into the area occupied by French troops since the Armistice.23
The failure of the revolution left Sorge desperate and rootless. ‘I have almost totally cut myself off from everyone in Germany, which is not something I would call sad in the usual sense,’ Sorge wrote from Aachen to his cousin and friend Erich Correns. ‘For a vagabond such as I, who cannot keep anything in his hands, this seems the only possible state. I am so completely up in the air, so completely homeless that the road is my preferred place and path.’24
It was not only Sorge who had lost hope and direction. Germany’s communists, too, descended into the kind of infighting and bickering to which they had been pathologically prone since the days of Sorge’s great-uncle Adolf, Karl Marx’s friend, forty years before. In the wake of the German revolution’s failure, the German Communist Party split into two, then three, rival factions. Though Sorge, from his lowly vantage point of a local labour organiser, could not have known it at the time, the struggles of the German party were a clear reflection of a larger power grab by Moscow.
Vladimir Lenin had always envisioned himself the undisputed leader of world revolution. Yet the Spartacists and their successors had always remained infuriatingly independent of the Russian Bolsheviks’ party line. Now, with German communism temporarily crushed and many of its leaders murdered or imprisoned, Moscow’s men were moving in to take control of the German party. In due course, they would also take personal control of Richard Sorge.
Sorge continued teaching at the higher school in Aachen while at the same time editing a local communist party newspaper, The Voice of the People. Kurt Gerlach agreed to an amicable divorce, and Sorge and Christiane moved in together in the nearby steel town of Solingen. It soon became evident that the police were keeping a close watch on Sorge, and were looking for an excuse to chase him out of town as a dangerous radical. A couple living in sin provided the excuse the authorities needed. To stay out of trouble Sorge, the wanderer, would have to contemplate entering what he called the ‘bourgeois curse’ of marriage. ‘Because the police naturally want to throw me out of Solingen, but had no grounds to do so, they will try to use the pretext that [our cohabiting] is creating a public scandal,’ Sorge explained in a letter to Correns on 19 April 1921. ‘To the bourgeois, living together constitutes a scandal. It annoys both of us, but we will have to bite the sour apple.’25 In an earlier letter to Correns he had vowed that ‘not even internally, do I need another person to be able to live; I mean really to live, not simply vegetate’.26 Nonetheless in May 1921, he and Christiane were officially registered as man and wife.
It was during this period of domesticity that Sorge also made his first forays into Marxist polemics, penning a pamphlet on ‘The Accumulation of Capital and Rosa Luxemburg’, a critical study of the theories of the dead Spartacist leader. It is an extraordinarily dull work. Even Sorge later admitted it was ‘clumsy and immature, and I hope that the Nazis burned every last copy’27 – though it’s more likely that his politically incorrect praise for Luxemburg’s respect for parliamentary democracy made the monograph an embarrassment to his later communist orthodoxy. But if Sorge had hopes for a career as a Marxist academic, they were disrupted at the end of 1922 when he was expelled from the higher school at Aachen for ‘engaging in a heated political controversy’.28 The party, in any case, had different plans for him. The Ruhr was a solidly proletarian region demonstrably ripe for revolution – but the labour movement was dominated by moderate Catholic trades unions that were, in the party’s view, in need of urgent conversion to communism. The local branch of the German Communist Party, correctly valuing Sorge more as a doer than a thinker, therefore suggested that he become a miner and – literally – an underground agitator.
Unskilled but physically strong, Sorge found a job at a coal mine near Aachen, where he organised a socialist cell before moving on to do the same at another pit. ‘Life in the mines was tough and dangerous,’ he would later tell his Japanese captors, especially hard because his war wounds still brought on spasms of pain. ‘But I never regretted the decision. The experience as a miner was no less valuable than the experience of the battlefield, and my new vocation was equally significant to the party.’29
An effort to do similar work for the party in the coal-mining district of Holland in the Netherlands failed. Sorge was immediately identified as a troublemaker, expelled from the mine, and deported from the country. The Aachen mine-owners had also become alert to the threat of communist agitation, and Sorge found himself unable to find another job back in the Ruhr.
Becoming a party cadre remained as the obvious career choice – though Sorge, perhaps hedging his bets at this nadir of communist fortunes, continued to harbour hopes of becoming a serious academic. These scholarly aspirations would continue until the end of his life. He would always insist on being addressed as Herr (or Kamerad) Doktor Sorge, and contributed to academic journals. When he was arrested by the Japanese the secret police found an unfinished scholarly study of Japan in his bedside table.
Sorge was offered a salaried position in the party’s Guidance Department. He refused, choosing instead a post offered to him by Kurt Gerlach – who clearly bore no grudges towards his wife’s new spouse – at the newly founded Institute for Social Studies in Frankfurt of which Gerlach had recently been appointed director.30 Christiane created a tasteful home that quickly became a lively leftist salon. One guest was Hedwig Tune, an attractive, slender actress of Austrian Jewish background and the wife of Gerhard Eisler, editor of the communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne. Inclined to schoolgirl crushes on people and causes, Hedwig – later to become famous under her second married name of Hede Massing – admired Sorge extravagantly.31
‘He did not fit the general pattern of the German communist, neither did Christiane. They displayed better taste and more gusto than was customary in communist circles,’ she wrote of the Sorges. ‘Their home was the centre of social life within this group. I remember how quaint it looked, with its antique furnishings carried over from Christiane’s past as a rich bourgeois professor’s wife. There was a fine collection of modern paintings and rare old lithographs. I was impressed by the easy atmosphere and grace with which the household was run. I liked the combination of serious talk and lust for living.’32 Massing cheerfully admitted that she moved ‘only among the upper crust of the communists’ – and described their circle’s ‘rather snobbish attitude’ to people who were not as bright as they were.33 Hede would nonetheless soon become a legendary Soviet spy.34
Sorge combined teaching with part-time party work, lecturing and editing as he had in Aachen. But he soon he
found himself pulled into the clandestine world. With the police keeping close watch on the better-known leaders of the Frankfurt party, Sorge was tasked with handling ‘all the secret liaison between the Central Committee in Berlin and the organisation in Frankfurt’. He hid the party funds and propaganda material in his study at the university, also concealing ‘large bundles in the coal bin in the classroom’ of the social science library. By October 1923 galloping inflation saw the value of the Reichsmark decline to 60 million to the dollar. In Saxony the party took advantage of mass protests to launch yet another armed rebellion and declare a workers’ republic. During the brief rebellion Sorge was chosen to maintain ‘constant secret communication’ with the rebel leadership, travelling ‘frequently on special missions to deliver essential political and organisational reports and directives’ from Frankfurt and Berlin.35
The Saxon uprising was crushed, as was a similar communist rebellion in Hamburg and, soon after, an abortive right-wing putsch in Munich organised by the young firebrand Adolf Hitler. But Sorge had proved his worth as a clandestine operative. When a communist convention was organised in Frankfurt for April 1924, Sorge was a natural choice to provide security for the Soviet guests. Specifically, they were delegates of the Communist International, better known as the Comintern, an organisation that would soon gather Sorge into its embrace.
Karl Marx had declared in his Communist Manifesto that ‘the working class has no country’ and called for proletarians of all countries to unite.36 In his 1902 tract What is to Be Done? Lenin laid out the idea that communist parties should be established across the world to aid the international proletarian cause – and founded the Comintern as the ‘General Staff of the World Revolution’.37 In practice, after taking power in Russia, Lenin saw himself as the unequivocal chief of that General Staff. He insisted that the Russian Bolsheviks, as the only group in the world that has actually brought revolution into being, should assume leadership of revolution around the world too.38 The Comintern was in many ways the quintessential Leninist institution, shaped by the Russian leader’s twin passions: an obsession with secrecy and a preoccupation with absolute power. Its aims were never remotely democratic.39 Thus, from its very beginning in 1919, the Communist International was founded on a deception. Ostensibly, its role was to foster communism all over the world. Its true function was to gather all foreign radicals into one grand network under the control of Moscow, and to act as a front for Soviet propaganda and intelligence-gathering.40
The First Congress of the Comintern, held in a crowded little hall near the Moscow Courts of Justice in March 1919, set the tone of fake ecumenicalism. It ostensibly hosted fifty-two delegates from thirty-seven international communist parties. In practice, however, the English ‘delegate’ was a Russian émigré who had worked as a tailor in England and now served as secretary to the Soviet foreign minister, while the Japanese were represented by a Comrade Rutgers who had only once visited Japan. Lenin penned an editorial in Pravda, the official party paper, boldly declaring that ‘the Soviets have conquered throughout the whole world’. There was, according to one English witness, ‘a make-believe side to whole affair’.41
Germany was, from the very beginning, world revolution’s key prize. Germany, as Lenin often said, was the ‘powder keg of Europe’. And he proposed to make the keg blow with a spark sent sizzling through the Comintern’s invisible incendiary network, a fuse that ran from Lenin’s office at the Kremlin straight to that unexploded bomb that was the German proletariat’s revolutionary consciousness.42
By the time Richard Sorge encountered the Comintern delegation at Frankfurt in 1924, the organisation had acquired a formidable apparatus and was led by Lenin’s trusted lieutenant Grigory Zinoviev. It had also successfully backed a series of very real and violent revolutionary actions. One was the abortive Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, which had been supported by Moscow’s gold and several hundred Russian fighters who styled themselves the ‘Terror Group of the Revolutionary Council of the Government’. The Comintern also played a leading role in a failed coup in Estonia by the local Communist Party. And soon after French troops occupied the Ruhr valley in 1921 – after a dispute over unpaid compensation payments stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles – a Soviet sabotage cell was dispatched to Germany to try to spark a fresh wave of revolutionary violence. The team of Russian saboteurs and their German accomplices attempted to dynamite an express train from Halle to Leipzig as part of a wider ‘March Action’ of locally organised rebellions intended to kick-start a fresh nationwide uprising.43 The Soviet Army was even mobilised on the newly drawn Russian-Polish border to intervene in this latest attempt at a German revolution. But, like the Spartacist rising, the Red Ruhr and the Saxon People’s Republic before it, the March Action of 1921 ended in failure.
The Comintern’s ideology may have been undeniably Marxist. But its primary tactical consideration, as laid out in Lenin’s ‘Twenty-one Conditions’ of August 1921, was that communist parties worldwide should never acknowledge the legality of the bourgeois state and refuse to participate in bourgeois democracy. In practice that led to a fundamental clash with the German Communist Party, whose moderate leader Paul Levi found himself expelled from the party under pressure from Moscow for condemning the March Action – as well as for proving insufficiently hostile to participation in elections.44 In short, the Russians who attended the 1924 Communist Party congress in Frankfurt were not so much delegates as the unacknowledged puppet masters of the German party.
Sorge’s job was to ‘look after the security of these important delegates, to see to their quarters, and decide upon the activities in which they might safely engage’.45 Heading the delegation was Osip Pyatnitsky – born Iosif Aronovich Tarshis – head of the Comintern’s International Department. The son of a Jewish carpenter from Lithuania, Pyatnitsky had trained as a tailor’s apprentice before going into revolutionary politics and rising to become a member of the Soviet Party’s Central Committee. He was personally close to Lenin and had smuggled clandestine correspondence from Lenin in Zurich into Russia during the abortive 1905 revolution. His deputy was Dmitry – born Dmitro – Manuilsky, a grinning, heavily moustachioed son of a Ukrainian priest. Another member of the Comintern Executive Committee was Otto Kuusinen, a Finnish communist who went on to found the Scandinavian branch of Soviet military intelligence, personifying the blurred line between the Comintern and the USSR’s spying activities (he would later be appointed head of a puppet regime set up by Stalin in his homeland).46 The fourth key delegate was Solomon Lozovsky, general secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions, or Profintern, set up by Lenin as a separate institution to the Comintern but with the parallel aim of bringing international trades unions under Moscow’s control. Not one of the senior Soviet delegates to the German congress was, in fact, an ethnic Russian.
Sorge, by his own account, ‘fulfilled this far from simple mission to the satisfaction of all concerned’.47 Though all the Russian delegates were in Germany illegally, none were arrested or harassed. Their confidential communications remained so, and they evidently found their quarters comfortable. In short, they were impressed by their sternly efficient twenty-eight-year-old German protector.
Unbeknown to Sorge, Pyatnitsky’s mission was less a friendly gesture of solidarity to the fraternal German Communist Party than a calculated headhunting mission. Lenin had died in January 1924. In the wake of the failures of communist uprisings in Germany, Estonia, Hungary and Italy – where the Fascist squadristi broke up strikes that gave their leader Benito Mussolini the excuse to assume power following a march on Rome in 1922 – the Comintern’s focus was shifting decisively from the immediate activity of world revolution towards helping to defend the Soviet state. More importantly still, the party’s rising star Iosif Stalin was advocating ‘socialism in one country’. As Stalin was soon to make clear: ‘an internationalist is one who is ready to defend the USSR without reservation, without wavering, unconditionally; for the USSR it
is the base of the world revolutionary movement, and this revolutionary movement cannot be defended and promoted without defending the USSR’.48
So in Frankfurt Pyatnitsky and his comrades were in fact scouting out which German communists were willing to support the USSR over and above their own local party interests – and would therefore be earmarked for future leadership roles – and which were not. They were also on the lookout for bright young recruits who would be useful to the Soviet intelligence network.
‘My relations with the Comintern delegates were very intimate, and we grew more friendly every day,’ recalled Sorge.49 Both sides, evidently, had succeeded in charming the other. The same cannot be said for Christiane, who was appalled by the revolutionaries’ table manners when her husband brought the delegates to the apartment that she had tastefully furnished. ‘I see them sitting on my violet sofa, eating peanuts which they had brought with them,’ she recalled in a short memoir published in 1964 in a Swiss newspaper. ‘They simply threw the shells on the carpet.’50
Ignoring Christiane’s dubiously bourgeois sensibilities, Pyatnitsky made Sorge an offer. ‘At the close of the session, they asked me to come to Comintern headquarters in Moscow that year to work for them.’ Specifically, the Soviet comrades had asked Sorge ‘to have me set up an intelligence bureau for the Comintern’.51
An Impeccable Spy Page 4