130th anniversary of Richard Sorge's birth

Saturday, October 4th, marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of one of the most effective intelligence officers in the history of espionage - Richard Sorge.

Richard Sorge was born in 1895 in Baku to a German family that moved to Germany three years later. After the outbreak of the First World War, he enlisted in the German army and was wounded. During his convalescence in a hospital, he became deeply influenced by communist ideas. He held two doctoral degrees - one in Economics and another in Political Science and Law.

Following the ban of the Communist Party in Germany, he moved to Moscow, where he received Soviet citizenship and membership in the All-Union Communist Party. He worked for the Comintern apparatus, later in China, and from the mid-1930s, in Japan.

He arrived there as a correspondent for several European newspapers and remained for a full eight years, during which Soviet intelligence had a complete and objective picture of the developments on the Far Eastern frontiers. In 1944, Sorge's network was uncovered, and he was executed in a Tokyo prison.