In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, a semi-independent region controlled by China. In 1937, Japan invaded China itself.
Up to that time, a civil war divided China between the communists and the nationalists. Both sides declared a truce and agreed to work together to stop the invading Japanese.
The Soviet Union wanted Manchuria for itself, and was afraid that the Japanese would invade the USSR. The Soviets, who’d already been supporting the communist party in China, helped the Chinese against the Japanese.
The truce in China was an uneasy one. The communists and the nationalists knew that, as soon as the Japanese were gone, they’d fight each other again. Each side was seeking to undermine the other, even before the Japanese were defeated.
In addition to military conflict, all the involved parties employed substantial espionage networks, as historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:
To deal with this complex of issues and protect their flank in Asia, the Soviets had on the ground in China a formidable group of undercover agents. Foremost among these was the German Communist Richard Sorge, perhaps the most effective secret agent in Soviet history (enshrined in the Moscow pantheon of intelligence heroes).
The GRU is a Soviet intelligence agency. It is older than the KGB. The GRU was founded in 1918, and still exists today. The KGB didn’t start until 1954, and was disbanded in 1991.
The breadth of the international communist conspiracy can be seen in the GRU, which was active all over the world, and employed people from many different nations. Richard Sorge was a German, employed by the Soviets, working in China against the Japanese, and working with communists from the United States and Britain.
As of the latter 1930s, Sorge was a ten-year veteran of the GRU (military intelligence) and head of an extensive pro-Red network based in Shanghai. His group was a veritable microcosm of the Soviet global project, including as it did the Red Chinese apparatchik Chen Han Seng, the American pro-Soviet writer Agnes Smedley, the German-born naturalized Briton Guenther Stein, and influential Japanese Communists Hotsumi Ozaki and Kinkazu Saionji.
Born in 1895 in Azerbaijan to a German family, Richard Sorge grew up in Berlin, and studied political science and economics at the universities of Berlin, Hamburg, and Kiel, earning a Ph.D.
Like many people of his era, WW1 caused an internal crisis of belief for Sorge. He developed a belief in communism.
Sorge was a battle-wounded German veteran of World War I, disillusioned by the carnage inflicted by that struggle and accompanying economic chaos, who became convinced that capitalism was the source of these social evils. In 1929 he joined the German Communist Party and would later be sent to Moscow for training as an agent of the Comintern, dealing in “political intelligence.” He was subsequently transferred to Soviet military intelligence, specializing in Far Eastern matters.
Because Stalin’s Soviet Socialist government was allied with Hitler at the time, Richard Sorge joined the Nazi party in 1933. The USSR and the Nazis were allied until June 1941, when the Nazis attacked the Soviet Socialist homeland.
Sorge travelled frequently and during the 1930s was in China, Germany, Japan, and the USSR. In 1941, he was discovered in Japan and arrested by the Japanese government. He died in 1944.
