6 Mother: Nina Kobelev, a conventional Russian beauty (big eyes, bony pink cheeks, rotund nose, small mouth with thick lips, cobwebby mustache-shadow, long silky hair, etc.), the daughter of Wilhelm’s landlord in Baku. Sorge was born on October 4, 1895, after 37 hours of hard labor. Let us note an obvious thing: Germany was his Fatherland, Russia was his Motherland.
7 Having agreed to write the full confession, Sorge demanded a (black-and-green) Pelikan fountain pen and a hard-covered notebook with blank sheets. Yoshikawa himself delivered the writing devices. Sorge thanked him and said, in poor Japanese: “Honourable Procurator, this fountain pen is a poisonous fountain pen.” Yoshikawa replied: “Honourable Spy, it is the redeeming fountain pen.” Then they both laughed.
8 Sorge never disguised himself, but changed names often. He bragged to Max Klausen that he had more names than women (“And that is a lot, Max!”). He was known as I. K. Sorge, R. Sonter (Moscow 1924–1928); Johann, Sebastian (Sweden, 1928); Christopher, Christian (England, 1929); Johnson, Jim, Gimon, Marlowe (Shanghai, 1930–1932); Richard Sorge (Tokyo, 1933–1944); and there were many other, unknown, evanescent names.
9 Sorge’s activities were much less adventurous than an avid reader would hope. In his written confession, Max Klausen, referring to the years 1933–1939, says: “Six dangerous years passed uneventfully,” pointing toward the routine of everyday spying. Sorge’s spying meant patiently collecting diverse, and sometimes ostensibly trite, information: a gossip about the Anti-Comintern Pact negotiations; a rumor about the Cabinet changes; the essence of a drunken soldier’s swaggering about the military life in Manchuko; someone else’s husband being with someone else’s wife—useful information for the future Index; air of insurgent desires of young army officers, brought from afar by Miyagi; chitchat among foreign journalists; a careless remark of the German ambassador about “everybody being crazy in Berlin about the Russia attack.” In 1936, however, Sorge obtained a position as the unofficial secretary to the German military attaché, Colonel Ott (“an honest, pleasant, gullible man, with oily military hair, and a thousand and one WWI stories”), and in 1939 he became the German embassy press attaché. This position enabled him to access documents that were considered confidential, even top-secret. Only occasionally he would photograph the document, as in the case of the preliminary document for the Anti-Comintern Pact. Mostly, there was no need for surreptitiousness for he would take any desired document to his improvised office (ex-coffee-kitchen, still reeking of beer from the party celebrating the anniversary of the Hitler ascension) where he would photograph it, or even make notes, at his will. In his article in Literaturnaya Gazeta (January 20, 1965), entitled “The Man Who Never Knew Enough,” Victor Venykov aptly notes: “A spy is above all a man of politics, who must be able to grasp, analyze and connect in his mind events which seemingly have no connection. He must have the breadth of a historian, the meticulous powers of observation, the spirit and the mind of Tolstoy. Espionage is a continuous and demanding labor and the spy forms himself in that process. Least of all was Sorge like those secret agents whom certain Western authors have created. He did not force open gates in order to steal documents: the documents were shown to him by their very owners. He did not fire his pistol to penetrate the places which he had to penetrate: the doors were graciously opened to him by the guardians of the secret. He did not have to kill. But he was murdered by the brutal machinery”
10 In October 1935, Sorge met, at the Rhdingold, Miyake Hinako, a geisha with mild socialist inclinations (“Like many other women I used to read left-wing novels”). She didn’t mind Sorge’s relentless promiscuity (“It is only natural, isn’t it, for a famous man to have several mistresses”). After Sorge’s execution, Hanako-san patiently pestered the strict prison authorities to allow her to recover Sorge’s body. The ascetic coffin was retrieved from the part of the Sugamo prison cemetery that was reserved for nameless vagrants. Decomposition was rather advanced, and only a large skeleton remained. The large skull (she kissed his ex-forehead) and the bones were those of a foreigner; and there were clear marks of damage to the bones—the eternal result of Sorge’s war wounds. Hanako recognized the teeth (and imagined a smile) from their gold filling (from which, in 1946, she had a ring made). She had the coffin removed to the quiet Tama graveyard, just outside Tokyo. “The Society for the Relief of Those Sacrificed in the Ozaki Case” raised funds for Sorge’s gravestone, upon which the inscription, in English and Japanese, reads: “Here sleeps the brave stranger who devoted his life to opposing war, and to the struggle for the piece [sic!] of the world.” In the early summer of 1965, Hanako-san was invited to visit the Soviet Union. At the Black Sea (“This sea is not as black as our sea”—a polite chuckle from the escorting throng followed) resort of Yalta, Hanako-san saw a performance of Press Attaché in Tokyo, a play dealing with Sorge’s life in Tokyo, in which she was rendered by a certain Yekaterina Maximovna.
11 Sorge worked for the Fourth Bureau of the Red Army Intelligence, which none of the members of his ring (Klausen, Voukelitch, Ozaki, Miyagi) knew—they all referred to “the Moscow center” and were happy to work for peace in the world. Jan Karlovich Berzin (real name: Peter Kyuzis) was the all-seeing head of the Fourth Bureau. He was the son of poor Latvian parents, born in Ogre, 1890. At the age of nineteen he was arrested by the Tsarist police for involvement in an assassination plot (a plan to throw a hand grenade at the chief of the Okhrana in the Bolshoi had failed), was sentenced to death and then pardoned because of his youth. He spent some time in prison but surfaced again in 1917 as a member of the Petrograd Bolshevik Party and charged at the Winter Palace. He was the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs in Soviet Latvia in the spring of 1919, when the military success of the White armies led him to take over command of the Latvian Rifle Division. His first act of command was shooting the previous commander (name lost) with his Luger, having accused, tried, and sentenced him for “revolutionary feebleness” in front of the petrified Rifle Division, right through his left eye (the unfortunate previous commander’s brain spurting on the numb political commissar, who later committed suicide). The legend of this execution followed Berzin when he was being made head of the Fourth Bureau and reached Sorge the day before he was to meet him. Berzin and Sorge quickly became friends (Sorge: “I respected his blood-red facial scars and his bright gray hair”). They used nicknames when addressing each other: Berzin was Starik, Sorge was Ika. In 1935, Berzin was arrested and strangled with piano wire (a rather creative execution) as a German spy. It seems that Sorge never found out about Berzin’s political death. He never mentioned him, however, after his last visit to Moscow in 1935. Sorge never admitted working for the Red Army, and the Soviet Union maintained, after his arrest, that he had worked for the Comintern, which was supposedly beyond the jurisdiction of the Soviet authorities.
12 The encoded message carrying reports on Sorge’s (and his co-spies’) activities were sent regularly, although at different, previously agreed upon, times. Max Klausen was the telegraphist (and only the telegraphist). Sorge trusted his blunt ignorance and his (“almost admirable”) lack of will. The radio operated from Voukelitch’s home in the Bunka apartment complex, across from a rather malodorous canal, named Ochanomizu—”honourable tea-water“; or from Klausen’s apartment, in the Akasaka district, with the windows perennially behind curtains of drying bed sheets and underwear; or, almost never, from Sorge’s place (No. 30 Nagasaka-cho) in Azabu, an affluent part of the city. The book used for coding messages was an edition of the Complete Shakespeare, probably one of the Cambridge editions from the late twenties. Max Klausen: “We would send the number of the play in the book (we called it the Book), then the number of the act, then the number of the scene upon which the scramble-code would be based. I had never read Shakespeare and found it quite boring, but Sorge was able to quote lengthy passages from any play. I remember once we used a passage, I forgot from which play, where there was a phrase ‘God’s spies.’ Sorge recited the whole passage (I
also remember butterflies in that passage) and then said: ‘We’re God’s spies, except there’s no God,’ and we got a kick out of that and laughed like mad.”
(The passage that Klausen alludes to is from The History of King Lear and goes as follows:
“… so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,
And take upon’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies.”)
13 On the outset of Sorge’s mission to Japan, Berzin told him: “The only thing you should trust and rely upon is the omnipresence of surveillance. There’ll be eyes everywhere, and nowhere.” Sorge was all too well aware of being watched: even on the Junker flight, he felt a gaze adhered to his body (although that may have been Mary Kinzie). Once in Japan, the following things made Sorge aware of the surveillance:
a) he was being watched by Maritomi Mitsukado, a reporter for Juji Shimpo, who would always somehow find him in any bar or at any party and then ask a transparent question like: “Do you think this tyranny will last forever?” (Sorge: “What tyranny?”);
b) his maid and laundryman were frequently questioned and tortured by police;
c) a woman he slept with (name lost) got up in the middle of the night and went through his pockets, finding nothing;
d) in bars and restaurants, even at the Imperial Hotel, he was constantly monitored by plainclothesmen of the Thought Police (sticking out of the careless crowd by being too focused on him);
e) his house was searched and his suitcase examined, during his absences;
f) most of all, it was a sense that he developed, a sense that someone’s gaze was always at the nape of his neck, like a wart.
Sorge: “When you know you’re being watched, you assume a role and play it, even when you sleep—even when you dream. Most of my life I played Richard Sorge, and I was someone else, somewhere else. The ubiquitous surveillance makes everything look differently—you see things through someone else’s eyes. Everything is more present—more real—because you see nothing alone.”
14Sorge’s group maintained radio contact mainly with Vladivostok (code name: “Wittenberg”) and, seldom, Moscow (code name: “Munich”).
15 In 1924, upon a decoy invitation from the Moscow Marx-Engels Research Institute, left by the illustrious scholar Chichikov, Sorge left Germany for good and went to Moscow. Having spent some weeks in different (apart from German roaches) apartments, Sorge finally settled in the Lux Hotel, Room 101. The Lux was the place where all foreign comrades working for the Comintern lived. Indeed, a day after he took off his socks, poured down his throat a gigantic glass (with misty fingerprints all over) of vodka and unpacked his two suitcases (one of which was full of books: Das Kapital, Doctor Faustus, Seven Sweet Little Girls, etc.), he was visited by comrades Pyatnitski, Kuusinen, Klopstock. The three Comintern activists were infamous for never leaving the proximity of each other (“They were called the ‘Three Kings,’ but then Klopstock disappeared in the late thirties, I think”). They talked to him all night long, becoming friends along the way, and effortlessly recruited him for the Comintern Intelligence Division.
PYATNITSKI: “The Comintern is not a party but a world organization of national Communist parties. It toils for world Communism, for the incorporation of the whole world into a single Communist society.”
KUUSINEN: “That is, it seeks to do away with private ownership of the means of production, with class exploitation and oppression, with racial tyranny, and to unite nations in accordance with a single master plan.”
KLOPSTOCK: “In form and theory, the Comintern is the brains directing activities of the sections as they endeavor to achieve a goal for this stage in the development of world Communism.”
ALL: “Welcome!”
In the thirties the Lux Hotel became a virtual detention camp, for foreign comrades were more liable to become foreign spies. The hotel tenants’ revolutionary activities were palsied, as they were perennially waiting for the NKVD footsteps to stop before their doors. A car stopping noisily in the middle of the night, in front of the hotel, would have a suicide or two as a consequence. No tenant would let the cleaning personnel into his or her apartment, and after a while cleaning was abandoned altogether. Hence already uncontrollable roaches multiplied exponentially. By 1941, none of the residents from the thirties were left in the hotel, apart from now gigantic cockroaches and a comrade from Yugoslavia, mad and dying, preserved only due to a careless bureaucratic error.
16Beside German Imperialism (1927), a study of the political will that led to the slaughter of WWI, and The Accumulation of Capital and Rosa Luxemburg (1922), a study of the life and theories of the great German revolutionary, Sorge’s most important work was Marxism and Love (1921), a work about human relationships in the context of merciless exploitation. In the Introduction, Sorge writes: “Thus love is not possible in a class society, for every human relationship is a relationship of property, exploitation, and ideological subjugation. Love as a concept can be achieved only in a classless society, where a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Just as the decisive intensification of class struggle, exposing the cruelty of capitalism, leads towards the revolution, the intensification of purely sexual relations would expose the inhumanity of individual human relations. The consequent objectified vacuum of inhumanity would simply require a revolutionary action. Love, to sum up, is not what we need now—what we need now is sex!” Scholars claim that Marxism and Love is more a product of the unfulfilled desire for Christiane, the wife of Kurt Gerlach, his teacher at the Kiel University, than a product of studious research. Some, however, tried to show that Marxism and Love (and some articles like “Anal Sex and Revolution” from 1923) influenced Wilhelm Reich. Sorge himself was not too proud of his early theoretical work: “I am convinced that my handling of these difficult theoretical questions was cumbersome and immature, and I hope that the Nazis burned every last copy.”
17 Sorge’s house was what the Japanese in those days called a bunka jutaku, or “an up-to-date residence,” which was, by contemporary European and American standards, rather small. Alphonse Kauders, who visited Sorge in 1939, described it as “scarcely more than a two-story doghouse in a small garden.” In the upstairs room that Sorge used as his study, the untidiness that surrounded him amused his friends (Kauders: “It was like a Verdun of things”) and horrified his housemaid (“German pig!”), for there was a seeming chaos of books, maps, magazines, and papers. Kauders recalls that many of the books were on economics (notably on the geisha wage system), that there were American movie magazines (obtained from Gimon), and that there was “some quite interesting Asian pornography.” There were one or two fine Japanese prints and some expensive pieces of bronze and china. There were photographs of Japanese creek dams and a photograph of Greta Garbo on the thin walls. The room also contained a gramophone, and a pet owl (fed with local mice and cockroaches) in a cage. Sorge respected Japanese customs by removing his shoes at the front door and by wearing velvet slippers on the stairs and in the tiny corridor. He slept in Japanese fashion, on a mattress laid on the tatami, with his head on a small round, hard pillow. Kauders, describing Sorge’s bathroom, remembers that the fanatically clean Sorge “scrubbed himself daily, as if there was no tomorrow, and then, drawing up his knees, climbed into the wooden tub, filled with scorchingly hot water.”
18 Sorge’s grandfather, Adolph Sorge, had served as the secretary for the First International during Marx’s lifetime. Grandpa Adolph told Sorge, throughout his childhood, Marx stories: about Marx reading Shakespeare (in English) and the Greek tragedies (in Greek) every July; about Marx and Engels playing tennis (Marx always losing), as the officials of the First International watched them, moving their heads “left-right, left-right, like a clock pendulum”; about Grandpa Adolph, stoppin
g by Marx’s home and taking him to a bogus meeting, covering Marx’s secret trysts with his (recently fired) housemaid; about Marx’s pathological fear of dentists—Engels or Grandpa having to go with him and hold his hand as the blood soaked his immortal beard; about holding, piously, the manuscript of The Communist Manifesto, knowing that it was something that was to change the world forever, “the world that philosophers theretofore only attempted to interpret.”
19 During his stay in Shanghai, Sorge was a frequent visitor of the infamous opium houses. In 1932, in the middle of the siege of Shanghai, in Gong Li’s opium bar, Sorge had a sensation of the physically split personality: Sorge stepped out of his own body and left it to wallow in its opiatic stupor, while he walked among the defenders, with a German nostalgia for trenches, handing out grenades to poorly clad and armed Chinese, not fearing Japanese bullets, hallucinating about “the eye of the ubiquitous sniper, the infinite preciseness of the supreme sharpshooter.”
20 Sorge was admitted to the Tokyo branch of the Nazi Party in October 1934. In his speech, preceding an orgiastic drinking contest, Colonel Ott said: “One cannot but feel that our cause will be only strengthened by the energy of Dr. Richard Sorge, our beloved fellow German. There’s no better occasion to use, once again, our Führer’s timeless words: ‘We have hundred of thousands of the most intelligent sons of peasants and workers. We will have them educated and are already doing so, and we wish them someday to occupy the leading positions of state and society, along the rest of our educated strata, and not the members of the alien people. We are determined to thwart and thrust aside this alien people that knew how to insinuate itself and seize all the leading positions for itself, for we want our own people for that position.’ I deeply believe that Dr. Richard Sorge’s blood will only enhance the purity of German blood. Welcome, Richard, welcome!”
The Question of Bruno Page 6
