Other Views:

One of the most recent additions to the literature on Sorge comes in a monograph by Owen Matthews: ‘An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent’ (London, Bloomsbury, 2019), which was reviewed by Jonathan Steele, in The Guardian, 18.5.2019. Matthews is an Oxford history graduate whose father was a research fellow at St.Antony’s College when Sir William Deakin, who wrote a standard text on Sorge in 1964, contacted him about some of the Soviet aspects of the case. Matthews himself has been a newspaper reporter who has been based in Moscow in most recent times and has looked there at some of the surviving archive material on Sorge, although this is not spelled out in academic detail. Unfortunately, too, Matthews himself manages to misspell the name of Deakin’s co-author, Geoffrey Storry, then head of Far Eastern Studies at St.Antony’s.

Much of the Matthews monograph concentrates on the rather more lurid aspects of Sorge’s sojourn in Japan, the life of deception punctuated with tales of seduction and alcoholic excesses, but his best argument lies in the point that Stalin failed to make any move that might extricate Sorge from the sentence of capital punishment decreed by the Japanese courts in 1943. On the other hand, the book fails to tackle the real issue as to whether Sorge’s reports to Moscow actually influenced Soviet military decision-making. Given that Stalin, like Hitler, was far from impressed with the efforts of his own agents in the field and indeed viewed them as entirely dispensable, his evaluation was at the opposite end of the scale which Sorge himself set in his own confessions to his Japanese interrogators about just how effective his contribution to the affair had been.

Sorge’s contribution can scarcely be evaluated in the highest terms and was rather far from the notion of the ‘impeccable spy’ that Matthews claims. Sorge may well have argued that he was ‘merely trying to avert war between Japan and the Soviet Union’, as Jonathan Steele affirms, but in reality the German attack on the USSR provoked a major internal row between the Japanese Army and Navy, which had a material impact on the alliance of the Japanese with the European Axis and arguably constituted the nub of internal contradiction within that alliance which can be identified as the key to its strategic downfall.

The story of Stalin’s purblind handling of the threat of German invasion prior to 22 June 1941 totally nullified Sorge’s efforts at influencing Soviet defence policy in ways that are carefully described by Stepan Mikoyan and Andrei Meretsalov in the book by the late John Erickson and David Dilks, eds. Barbarossa. (Edinburgh U.P., 1994). Sorge was just another individual among millions of Soviet citizens that were decimated as a result of Stalin’s utter cynicism and reliance on his approving entourage. Hitler’s reliance on General Ott for a reassurance that the ‘sly’ Matsuoka knew what the score was before he left for Moscow in April 1941 proved to be unfounded, while Hitler totally rejected the appeals of the Japanese Navy to reach a peace agreement with Stalin as early as October 1941 when it foresaw a dead end in Russia of the kind that had already embroiled the Japanese Army in a never-ending conflict in the interior of China. But, as in 1812, the crucial element at play was the weather, not Sorge at all.