five minutes with owen matthews
Interview for Pushkin House by Andrew Jack (@AJack)
What drew you to write Richard Sorge’s story?
I am intrigued by Sorge’s fascination with Russia and the ideals that Communism represented; and Russia’s projection of power and strategic fears in the Far East. The whole history of the Soviet Union has relied very heavily on fellow travellers. That was especially true in the golden era of the 1930s: the intellectual ferment of a whole generation of young Europeans and Americans with an ideological fascination for Russia. It’s interesting looking at the history of this generation, which saw in Russia a blueprint for the future - especially in the world of the early 1930s, if you happened to be German and you saw the West collapse, the rotten injustices, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism.
Given the previous books, why did you decide to write one about him?
Nobody had written a book in English on him before using Soviet sources. No western researcher had bothered to look at the archives. Because Sorge happened to work for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, rather than the NKVD, his files are in the defence ministry in Podolsk. There’s a huge amount of material. It’s hard to know what’s not in the archive, but there is really extraordinary stuff you wouldn’t expect in stitched-through files - all the correspondence between Moscow Centre and the Tokyo residentura.
Can you empathise with him?
Sorge or Kim Philby could certainly be forgiven for thinking they were on the right side of history. They were serving this impressive, morally just experiment in human life. On the other hand, in Sorge’s case, his fascination and genuine belief in Communism is tempered by knowledge of the practical cynicism of the regime, and the knowledge that in 1937-38 huge swathes of the Comintern were systematically rounded up and slaughtered for no good reason. Like all of us foreigners in love with Russia, there’s always an element of love-hate, a bemusement at the irrational cruelty of Russia which tempers our love.
Is it easier to write about a spy for foreign regimes than your own?
It’s easier from a moral point of view. The regime he betrayed was a Nazi one. The moral compass and trajectory of an idealistic German communist in the 1930s makes him one of the “goodies”. The same applies to the Japanese. He became a hero to generations of Japanese post-war socialists for opposing the military regime. It’s much easier for us to see someone as being ideologically motivated than if for instance they had the same motivations but were a spy for the Nazis.
How did he manage to infiltrate Japanese society?
He didn’t really do anything apart from the conspiracy of secret meetings. His information gathering was just journalism, which is why it was such a brilliant cover for him. All of his most valuable information - political titbits, gossip, the strategic choices of the Japanese high command - is basically just gathering sources: former journalists turned think-tankers turned government advisers. He created this extraordinary self-reinforcing virtuous circle of Germans, and used his understanding of the inner workings of Japanese government to feed that knowledge back and forth.
Was Sorge a successful spy?
The conclusion of my book is depressing and devastating. Everyone who studies Sorge’s career from the Japanese side assumed that everything ends with “and then he told Moscow” followed by a full stop – that Moscow then knew about it. In fact, Moscow ignored it. There was this gold plated, fantastically sourced intelligence pouring out of Sorge: the most impressive intelligence gathering operation in the history of espionage, given the time it went on and the quality. But all of it fell on deaf ears. It’s rather pathetic and tragic. The chiefs of Soviet intelligence were deliberately feeding Stalin only the information he wanted to hear. The apparatus was busy eating itself, denouncing and murdering each other, trying to stay alive. It was a grotesque picture of a totally dysfunctional institution which could have been so important and could have saved tens of millions of lives if it had actually listened.
What is your own view of Sorge?
I go back very often to John Le Carré’s fantastically perceptive view in a review in 1966, when he nailed Sorge with unparalleled brilliance. He said Sorge found in spying a string to tie together a bunch of middle-range talents. It gave him a higher cause and justification to behave as badly as he liked. Spying was an excuse for him to indulge in an array of personal character flaws including a psychopathic ability to lie to everyone around him. These human flaws were military and espionage virtues.
What do you think of past portrayals of Richard Sorge?
His existence had been denied by the Soviet authorities; he had been completely betrayed and ignored after he was arrested. Then in 1962, a film comes out, he was officially rehabilitated, there are articles and books about him. He becomes a great Soviet hero because he was a “good “German: at the time the Berlin Wall went up, Kennedy came to Berlin and the Soviet regime needs a good anti-fascist pro-Communist hero. Then in the late 1970s as Andropov is manoeuvring, he becomes a Soviet James Bond inspiring the TV series Stierlitz, which influenced the young Vladimir Putin. Now there is a Channel 1 TV series of him, as part of a Putin-era revival of Sorge as a hero spy.
What is your next book?
I have just finished a sequel to my novel Black Sun, set during the Cold War and based on the true story of the Soviet bomb. I’m inclined to take historians who are also novelists much less seriously. I hope that doesn’t apply to me. All my novels are based on historical events. My next non-fiction book is the story of Georgi Markov, the dissident killed with a poisoned umbrella. It’s a real-life spy murder mystery which is relevant again today.
Owen Matthews is a writer, historian and journalist. He is a former Moscow and Istanbul Bureau Chief for Newsweek magazine. His first book on Russian history was Stalin's Children, a family memoir, shortlisted for the 2008 Guardian First Books Award. His book Glorious Misadventures was shortlisted for the Pushkin House book prize in 2014. He is most recently author of a thriller set in the Soviet Union, Black Sun (2019).