Recent Books
212 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s
Master Agent
BY OWEN MATTHEWS. Bloomsbury,
2019, 448 pp.Richard Sorge was a German enraptured
with communism. In 1929, he became a
Soviet spy in the Far East. Operating in
Japan from 1933 until his arrest in late
1941, Sorge became a close adviser to
the German ambassador in Tokyo and
built a formidable espionage machine at
a time when all foreigners were under
close scrutiny from Japanese authorities.
Sorge’s main mission was to Änd out
whether Japan was planning to attack
the Soviet Union. But his most famous
report was one that warned o Germa-
ny’s imminent invasion in 1941—a
warning that was dismissed by his
bosses, who were fearful o contradict-
ing Stalin’s belie that Hitler would not
breach the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression
Pact. Matthews’ meticulously researched
book draws in particular on materials
from Soviet intelligence archives that
have never before been accessed by a
Western historian. These documents
show that, despite the vital intelligence
he provided, the Soviets always re-
garded Sorge as a potential traitor. Mat-
thews’ book is a spy thriller that dou-
bles as an enthralling history o
revolutionary Germany in the 1920s,
Tokyo during the country’s prewar
militarization, and Moscow in the
1930s, where Stalin’s mass terror con-
sumed, among others, seven o Sorge’s
military intelligence bosses.Catherine and Diderot: The Empress, the
Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment
BY ROBERT ZARETSKY. Harvard
University Press, 2019, 272 pp.
Zaretsky is a historian o France and, as
he admits, a newcomer to Russian
history. Hence, his short and entertaining
book tells readers more about Denis
Diderot than about the Russian empress
who invited the leading Enlightenment
philosopher to St. Petersburg. When the
60-year-old Diderot arrived in Russia in
1773, it was the Ärst time he had ventured
far from home. He shared with other
French philosophers o his time a view
o Catherine the Great as the embodi-
ment o enlightened despotism, a
leader driven by a faith in reason and
progress and dedicated to ensuring the
happiness o her subjects. As the book
makes clear, the philosopher initially
seemed poised to realize his dream o
playing mentor to the monarch. Cath-
erine eagerly engaged in debates with
Diderot. She was enthralled by his
audacious thinking, and he respected her
devotion to Enlightenment ideals.
Mutual disenchantment was, o course,
inevitable. Diderot eventually concluded
that the concept o enlightened despotism
was an oxymoron and that Catherine, alas,
was merely a despot. Catherine, mean-
while, gradually came to see philosophers
as useless, their writings paving the way
to endless calamities. Sill, Zaretsky cannot
help but admire Catherine and Diderot’s
mutual aection, which their mutual
disappointment did not diminish.