An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent

"It’s one more trajectory in this same story that I have been talking about. Sorge’s talent was lying without making much of an effort and loving it. He put this talent in the service of the larger good, the way he understood it. Normally people don’t like liars—it’s not good being a pathological liar—but if it’s a good lie, if you lie for the salvation of society, then, suddenly, you become a much, much more likeable person than you would be otherwise. The book is also about the appeal of communism and the ideas of communism in the first half of the last century. It attracted not only people captured by the regime, by the system, who had no easy way of escape like Eisenstein or Sholokhov, but also people from outside of the interwar equivalent of the ‘iron curtain.’ Communism at the time is about an international experiment, a new, bright future for mankind. It is the time of the spread of the communist movement all over the world. And the promised land is the Soviet Union. Sorge had deeper roots in the Russian Empire than some of the Brits and Americans who came to the Soviet Union to build the new future, but he certainly belonged to that same category and he served the regime abroad. It’s a story of Russian imperial industrialization, where you have Baku and its oilfields and experts coming from all over the world. Sorge spoke Russian and German. He’s a spy , so it’s a complex identity, but I think of him as mostly German. He certainly didn’t have to serve the cause or go back to Russia or the Soviet Union, or to think in patriotic terms. He could, but he didn’t have to do it. The big controversy about him is his spying for the Soviets in Japan and informing the Soviet authorities that Japan would not attack in 1941. This allegedly allowed Stalin to move divisions from the Far East and save Moscow. So it’s a big thing, but there is a lot of mythology. The question is whether anyone really paid any attention to what he reported, as the Soviets had other sources of information. He was right, and others were right about the Japanese invasion. That brings us to the saga of the American invasion of Iraq and questions about how the authorities treat intelligence; what you do with that intelligence and the mythology associated with it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The author, Owen Matthews, deals with the biography of Sorge in ways others haven’t. He goes to the sources; he goes to the archives. It’s a contribution in that sense. But it’s also one of the first books—along with Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor —in the genre of serious research but popularly written biographies of Russian spies. The majority of what is written about them is written in Russia, and now with Putin in power for close to 20 years, this is a very popular genre. It presents the Soviet intelligence agents as heroes. Owen Matthews’s work is much more balanced. It has bigger questions, about the character of the person, about the political landscape, about the choices that he made, about the state using intelligence but ignoring the information that came from it. That’s the kind of approach you don’t find in 99.9% of the books about the Soviet spies. In that sense, it’s an important book. The Oleg Gordievsky book by Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor , is maybe the first one of that kind, but it’s different because he couldn’t go to the KGB archives and ask for the documents. He had access to the person, who is alive and was prepared to talk. That’s a different angle. The books are maybe broadly in the same box, but they are also very different."