An Impeccable Spy

by Owen Matthews

  Sorge may have been waiting for the call for some time. Christiane wrote that the couple had already talked about moving to Moscow as early as their arrival in Frankfurt in 1922.52 A visiting high priest of Marxism, David Ryazanov, excited by Sorge’s great-uncle’s connection to Karl Marx, had invited Sorge to join his fledgling Institute of Marxist-Leninism.53 The German party chose not to let him go. But by 1924 such defiance of Moscow’s requests was becoming politically impossible. This time Berlin approved Sorge’s application to join Comintern headquarters. In October 1924, leaving Christiane to await confirmation of her future job as a librarian at the Institute of Marxist-Leninism, Sorge boarded a train for Moscow.

  3

  ‘A Fanatic Riff-Raff from a Ruined Century’

  ‘Sorge’s ghost has marched to glory, but behind him in wretched procession come the lost intellectuals, the lost patriots, the lost priests, defending countries and religions of which our children may never hear, a fanatic riff-raff from a ruined century’1

  John le Carré

  The Comintern lodged Sorge at the Hotel Lux on Tverskaya Street 36, Moscow’s central thoroughfare.2 Built in 1911 as the Hotel de France, the property had been one of pre-revolutionary Moscow’s smartest addresses. Taken over by the Bolsheviks and renamed – curiously – the Hotel de Lux, the place had quickly gone downhill. The guests were soon complaining of the rats.3 Nonetheless, it was convenient for the party’s newly formed security services to have foreign visitors where they could keep an eye on them. It was also a handy ten-minute walk from the Kremlin.

  By 1924 the Lux was run by the Communist International and inhabited by a community of displaced dreamers. Socialists from around the world – from the future Chinese premier Zhou Enlai to Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito – mingled over the meagre breakfast buffet. According to the Soviet newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya, these idealists had been drawn to the world capital of socialism from among the ‘millions of people in all corners of the world who had said to themselves “this is my revolution” … a new young generation which listened with hope and belief to every word from Moscow’.4 The self-selected champions of the proletariat pose stern and unsmiling in group photographs of the period. Soberly dressed, peering through angry little glasses, they resemble indignant librarians more than tough street fighters. In a world of physically diminutive Jewish intellectuals, the tall, Aryan, war-wounded Sorge literally stood out from the crowd.

  The atmosphere at the Hotel Lux was a strange mixture of revo-lutionary fervour and paranoia. ‘Everybody calls everybody a spy,’ recalled American radical Agnes Smedley after a visit in 1921. ‘Everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.’5 The Soviet government did not trust its foreign guests and kept close watch on what they were doing and saying.6

  Rats and spies notwithstanding, Sorge was in his element. He told his Japanese interrogators that his first job was in the Comintern’s Department of Information, ‘compiling reports on the labour move-ments and on economic and political conditions in Germany and other countries’.7 This was only partly true. Osip Pyatnitsky, who had personally recruited Sorge in Frankfurt, had been charged by Lenin in 1922 with establishing a clandestine organisation under the aegis of the Comintern that would run all illegal activity abroad, including running underground revolutionary cells.8 This espionage centre was innocuously named the International Communications Section, or OMS.9 It is clear from the Comintern archives that Sorge had extensive contact with OMS from the earliest days in Moscow and formally joined the network by 1927. Pyatnitsky, for his part, would remain Sorge’s patron and protector until the old spymaster fell from grace during Stalin’s Great Purge of the party in 1937 – at which point he would become a fatal liability to Sorge’s reputation.

  Christiane joined Sorge in Moscow in March 1925.10 Her ‘first impression of Russia: infinitely melancholy!’11 The couple, speaking no Russian, mingled almost exclusively with other German communists. The centre of the community was the German Club, a dingy place which contained a small library of German books but offered little else by way of entertainment. Sorge, soon elected its president, livened the club up a little by setting up a Young Pioneers Group for the children of the city’s German residents. Though she shared a small room in the Lux with her husband, Christiane felt desperately alone: ‘No one, ever, could violate the inner solitude, it was this which gave him his complete independence.’12 Hede Massing, who saw a lot of Christiane in Moscow, formed the impression that ‘she did not like the Russians’.13 The feeling was apparently mutual. Contemporaries recalled that Christiane’s nickname was ‘burzhuika’ – the bourgeoise.14

  Sorge, on the other hand, ‘saw everything in black and white’, noted a friend, and would brook no criticism of the workers’ paradise.15 Leaving Christiane alone at the Lux with increasing frequency, he would attend soirées at the homes of top Bolsheviks. The son of Grigory Smoliansky, sometime head of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, remembered Sorge’s magnetic presence at his father’s dinner table at their apartment in a building on Granatny Lane, reserved for the senior party elite. Sorge ‘wore a rough wool sweater and yellow corduroy jacket and looked like a foreigner’, recalled Vladimir Smoliansky. The German guest’s ‘intelligence and willpower made him stand out. Tall, strong, fair-haired, his direct gaze could be somewhat grim, but not self-absorbed. He listened to you with all signs of sympathy.’16 There are strong hints in Christiane’s memoir that Sorge was already using his strong, silent presence to attract other women. Bolshevism had, in its early years, gone hand in hand with sexual liberation. Sorge, like the feminist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai,17 considered himself an advocate of free love. Any woman who for whatever legal, moral, or social reason did not follow her physical urges he stigmatised as a ‘bourgeois goose’.18

  In the summer of 1926, Sorge and Christiane holidayed separately. He travelled to his home town of Baku, now the capital of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, where he found his old family home in Sabunçi converted into a convalescent home.19 Christiane took the train to the Black Sea resort of Sochi with a female friend. Sorge briefly joined them in Sochi, but their relationship was clearly on the rocks. ‘A tormenting anxiety came over me,’ wrote Christiane. ‘I could sense ever more clearly that our paths were moving apart through the same providence that once had made us collide with one another.’ By autumn, fed up with the miserable life at the misnamed Hotel Lux and her husband’s philandering and constant absences, she left for Berlin. As they parted on a cold Moscow railway platform late at night, Sorge ‘acted as if we would meet again soon. But as the train moved off, I could not stop the flood of tears. I knew it was the end of our life together, and he must have known it too.’20

  If Sorge was upset by Christiane’s departure, none of his friends or acquaintances noticed. Comintern official Pavel Kananov recalled often running into Sorge, happy and absorbed in Moscow bookshops. ‘He was a passionate bibliophile, you can tell by how a person holds a book in their hands.’ Another colleague, A. Z. Zusmanovich, frequently saw Sorge in the library of the German Club, ‘buried in books’. Zusmanovich also attended lectures given by Sorge at the club, which showed a ‘very organised and analytical mind … he gave the impression of an outstanding person and I thought he would become a great scholar’.21

  During this period, Sorge the scholar produced a series of learned, didactic articles and books,22 mostly about Germany’s social problems and the risk of renewed imperialism. As early as 1926, Sorge warned that ‘Germany, more than any other country, is inclined to pursue a policy of inflaming new imperialist conflicts and therefore German politics, with its conflictual nature, is inclined towards creating future wars’.23 His prescience had its limits, however. Sorge – writing in 1928 under the pseudonym of ‘R. Sonter’ in Inprecorr, the official journal of the Comintern – firmly predicted that the German working class would eventually revolt against the ‘dictatorship of capitalist interests devoted to crushing them’.24 Sorg
e, like most other socialists, completely failed to anticipate that German workers would become the most avid backers of fascism.25 He wrote two books during the time: The Economic Provisions of the Versailles Peace Treaty and The International Labour Class; both were published in Germany and translated into Russian.26

  Sorge the apparatchik, meanwhile, was charging up the Comintern’s career ladder. At the end of June 1925 he was already writing to the leadership to request a transfer to ‘more active work’ in the agitation and propaganda department. By April 1926 he had been promoted to the secretariat of the Comintern’s Executive Committee (known as the IKKI).27 The following May he sat on an important IKKI committee, charged with drawing up instructions for overseas communist parties in the event of a new war.28 His special subject was the rising problem of fascism.29 On at least three occasions Sorge attended meetings of the presidium where the party’s rising star, Iosif Stalin, was present.30 Conversation between the two, if there was any, must have been limited. Sorge still spoke little Russian, while Stalin’s German was non-existent and his English basic.31

  As for Sorge the spy, his own deliberate reticence about his activities in the 1920s and the breathless evidence of his admirer Hede Massing have given the impression of a secret and exciting career as a secret agent. ‘He took to conspiracy like a fish to water,’ recalled Massing. ‘He would flash an amused smile at you, his eyebrows raised in disdain for being unable to tell you where it was that he had spent his last year.’ She ‘did not have the slightest doubt that what he did was of the utmost importance’:

  So indoctrinated was I with communist behaviour that it seemed absolutely proper and right for me not to know and never to ask what he did, where he went, and for how long. Throughout the years that I knew him, he would turn up, call me and say, ‘What are you up to?’ I would cry out with joy and ask, ‘But how did you find me?’ And he would laugh. And I was pleased. It is he who instilled in me the feeling that there was simply nothing an apparatchik could not find out or do if he wanted to or had to. It was he who told me how lonely and ascetic the life of an apparatchik must be, with no attachments, no strings, no sentimentalities. I saw him as the hero of the revolution, the real hero, the quiet one, about whom nobody knew … To me he was the man of whom Rilke spoke in his poetry, ‘Ich bin der Eine’ [I am the lonely one] …32

  Sorge would indeed go on to do work of the utmost importance – in China and Japan. But the reality of Sorge’s first forays into secret work in Europe seems to have been rather less exalted than Massing imagined. For a start, despite Sorge’s own apparent enthusiasm for a foreign assignment, his superiors in the Department of Agitation and Propaganda seem to have had their doubts as to his suitability for secret work. ‘Re: Sorge. He cannot sit still and his work here isn’t working out,’ wrote a Comrade ‘Mikhail’ to Comrade ‘Osvald’ in April 1927. ‘He wants to leave as soon as possible and we are having difficulty sending him out for independent work because he has hardly any experience of practical work.’33 Nonetheless, Sorge’s persistent lobbying paid off. German police records show a Richard Sorge visiting Frankfurt from August to October 1927. He seems to have had contact with Yakov Mirov-Abramov, nominally the press attaché at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, who in reality headed Pyatnitsky’s secret OMS network in Berlin. It is not clear what Sorge was up to in Frankfurt – though the Berlin OMS bureau would become his main covert line of communication to his Comintern spymasters in Moscow.34

  In December 1927, Sorge was in Stockholm on his first clandestine mission outside Germany, under the codename Johann.35 It did not get off to a good start. ‘I arrived 17.12 at S[tockholm]. I have had no news from Oswald,’ Sorge wrote plaintively in a coded telegram dispatched to Comintern headquarters via Mirov-Abramov in Berlin. ‘Our friends here knew nothing about my arrival or what tasks I should undertake. I fear it will be the same in Kop [Copenhagen].’36 Sorge’s role seems to have been one of a government inspector, reporting on the ‘organisation of work in the [local party] apparat, the work of the departments, the question of leadership in general of unions and agitation and propaganda’. He also told his superiors that he intended to address ‘the question of factory newspapers and preparation for a likely coming strike in the paper industry at the end of January’.37 The picture of the Comintern that emerges from Sorge’s correspondence with his OMS chiefs in Moscow is of a chaotic organisation, obsessed with control while at the same time little able to organise its own agents.

  Nonetheless, Sorge impressed local communists with his intelligence and common touch. Kai Moltke, a member of the Danish Communist Party, wrote that as far as he knew, Sorge’s ‘mission had nothing to do with intelligence service or espionage’. Instead, Sorge gave lectures to party cells and advised Danish comrades to team up with radical trades unions. ‘His sense for detailed organisation was extraordinary. His behaviour was not at all illegal or conspiratorial. In his visits to the tough areas of the ports and the factories of Copenhagen he had to show that he would guzzle as many beers as a sailor, docker or cement worker or show his physical prowess as a wrestler.’38

  Back in Moscow, Sorge described the mission to the adoring Massing in mysterious, even bizarre, terms. ‘Ika’s first assignment was to some Nordic country (he never said which) where he lived “high in the mountains”, and where his company were “sheep, mostly”. He would ramble on about the human qualities of sheep once one got to know them.’39 In the altogether more serious setting of a Japanese prison, he told his interrogators that he had ‘assumed a position of active leadership alongside the other party heads’. Of his boozing and wrestling with the tough guys down at the docks, he admitted that he had done ‘intelligence work on Denmark’s economic and political problems, discussing my observations and findings with party representatives’.40

  On 9 December 1927, Sorge formally resigned from the IKKI secretariat to take up a full-time post as an OrgInsktruktor – organisational instructor – at the OMS, the heart of the Comintern intelligence apparatus.41 His old recruiter from Frankfurt, Dmitry Manuilsky, personally recommended him as a suitable member of the world revolution’s most secret club, and he was seconded by Grigory Smoliansky, his old host on Granatny Lane.

  The next year Sorge was back in Scandinavia, reporting on the party networks in Sweden and Norway and squabbling with the accountants back at head office over his expenses (an irritation that has persisted for foreign correspondents and, doubtless, spies ever since).42 In Oslo, as he told the Japanese, Sorge ran into ‘party problems of various descriptions that seriously impeded intelligence work’.43 The sources are silent on the exact nature of the squabble – but it is clear that some in Moscow were again growing frustrated by the waywardness of their man in Scandinavia. ‘There is no cause for you to fret as much as you have been,’ scolded one ‘Comrade Leonard’ in July 1928.44 The same apparatchik also wrote to OMS boss Pyatnitsky, strongly opposing an apparent plan to send Sorge on a secret mission to Britain. ‘Concerning the suggestion that he travel to A[nglia – England] I will express myself against. He is too weak for A and he cannot resist getting involved in political affairs. For A this is absolutely unacceptable.’45

  Despite his immediate bosses’ carping, Sorge still had powerful friends at the top levels of the Comintern. Manuilsky had enough confidence in his German protégé to appoint Sorge personal secretary to Nikolai Bukharin, the head of the Comintern, during its summer congress in Moscow in July 1928. At those meetings, Sorge later boasted, he: ‘participated in discussions concerning Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev’ – all senior anti-Stalin Bolsheviks whose fate would have been the subject of extremely sensitive discussions.46 At the end of the congress Bukharin, almost certainly acting on Stalin’s orders, formally excluded those three old Bolsheviks from the Comintern. It would be the beginning of a fall from grace that would end, for Zinoviev and Kamenev, in show trials and the execution cellars of the Lubyanka, and for Trotsky with an ice pick in the head in Mexico City. In other words, i
n 1928 Sorge had loyally stood with Bukharin against the ‘rightist deviationists’ and supported Stalin, the ‘Kremlin mountaineer’,47 in his inexorable climb to the summit of power.

  Back in Moscow, Sorge began taking Russian lessons from a young aspiring actress,48 Ekaterina ‘Katya’ Maximova. Friends described Katya as ‘calm and restrained … but she could take unusual decisions’.49 The most unusual – and ultimately fatal – such decision was to fall in love with Richard Sorge. One of Katya’s artist friends remembered Sorge as ‘a broad-shouldered guy in a blue sweater who sat in silence’. His expression was ‘calm and kind and open … an expression not captured in photographs’.50 The friend recalled that Sorge would jestingly describe himself in company as an Azerbaijanets (an Azeri) but could not speak a word of the language (this appears to be one of Sorge’s few recorded jokes).

  At gatherings at Katya Maximova’s tiny room in a communal apartment on Nizhny Kislovsky Lane the guests ‘didn’t drink wine – it was not done’. The clean-living young people drank tea with yellow sugar, sang songs, argued about the plays of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, about the music of Beethoven and Scriabin, and about socialist art.51 Katya taught Sorge poems by Alexandr Blok, which he would recite by heart – and though he was ‘a good storyteller, he often waved his hands when stuck for words and looked at Vera Izbotskaya, who knew French, to translate a word. But more often he would look to Katya.’ He liked to quote a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky:

  In our veins is blood not water

  We go forward through the bark of revolvers

  In order that as we die

  We transform

  Into ships

  Into shipping lines

  And other long-lived things.52