[ Unlike Kim Philby, Cold War-era Soviet master spy Richard Sorge
is not yet the subject of multiple novels, profiles and transatlantic
espionage dramas. He, his exploits and his tragic end at the hands of
Japanese militarism should be better known.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

SUSPICIOUS: A BIOGRAPHY OF MASTER SPY RICHARD SORGE  
[[link removed]]


 

Tariq Ali
November 21, 2019
London Review Of Books
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Unlike Kim Philby, Cold War-era Soviet master spy Richard Sorge is
not yet the subject of multiple novels, profiles and transatlantic
espionage dramas. He, his exploits and his tragic end at the hands of
Japanese militarism should be better known. _

GDR postage stamp commemorating Richard Sorge, Wikipedia

 

The skills of the three top Soviet spies of the 20th century –
Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper and Ignace Poretsky/Reiss (better known
as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular
attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in
history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and
General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is
the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this
book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory
worker in Kharkov who became head of the Communist Party’s regional
committee and was killed during the purges. Bibikov was a supporter of
Sergei Kirov, a party boss in Leningrad who although a loyal enough
Stalinist was alarmed by the excesses of collectivisation and keen to
allow some of the discarded oppositionists to rejoin the party. At the
Congress of Victors in 1934, when Stalin claimed the success of
collectivisation and the triumph of his own faction, Kirov obtained
the highest number of votes in the elections to the Central Committee.
Mysteriously, he was assassinated in December that year. Bibikov’s
turn came in October 1937. He was arrested and forced to confess to
his sins, which in his case included membership of a non-existent
clandestine ‘anti-Soviet rightist-Trotskyite’ organisation. He was
executed three months later.

 

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent
[[link removed]]
By Owen Matthews
Bloomsbury; 448 pages 
Hardcover:  £25.00 ($32.25)
March 21, 2019
ISBN 978 1 4088 5778 6

 

Bloomsbury
 

Matthews wrote about his family in _Stalin’s Children: Three
Generations of Love and War_ (2009), but despite this background his
new book isn’t strong on Sorge’s motivation, or on what led him
and others to sacrifice their lives to the cause. There isn’t much
new material in _An Impeccable Spy_, with the exception of Stalin’s
crude marginal notes on the Sorge file, but it does confirm and expand
on information included in earlier accounts, some of it from the
records of Soviet military intelligence, which haven’t been made
generally available.

Spying always accompanies war, revolution and counter-revolution.
Information-gathering networks have always been needed to report on
and infiltrate enemies within and without. Civil wars, in particular,
made this an absolute necessity, as Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre,
Lenin, Mao and Castro quickly understood. For centuries, the methods
of obtaining and transmitting vital information barely changed.
‘Cromwell,’ Pepys wrote in his diary, ‘carried the secrets of
all the princes of Europe at his girdle.’ The man who got them for
him was a civil servant called John Thurloe. A rector’s son from
Essex, Thurloe became head of intelligence in 1653, with access to all
state papers and secret documents. He pioneered a system of spy
networks which long outlasted the English Commonwealth. The documents
and reports brought back by couriers from the Continent (still
available in the British Library) were analysed in detail by a group
that included John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Among other things, they
helped support the operations of a navy engineered to preserve and
extend British interests.

Thurloe had a tendency to overreact to any threat of dissent. He dealt
harshly with Leveller factions and with the apprentices and joiners of
the Fifth Monarchy Men, proto-anarchists based in Mile End who were
allegedly preparing to assassinate Cromwell and unleash an
insurrection. Some of the men didn’t deny the main charge but
pointed out that mass uprisings can’t be ordered like a jug of
water. The House of Commons thanked Thurloe for his vigilance. A
silk-weaver of Whitechapel had revealed the plot. All this and much
else was meticulously recorded in the seven volumes of Thurloe’s
State Papers.

After the Restoration, the Earl of Clarendon was forced to negotiate
with Thurloe to acquire his spy network for the post-revolutionary
regime. In return, Thurloe was given the list of the people Clarendon
planned to arrest (the regicides in particular), which gave him time
to warn them to flee the country. Most went to Holland, but under
heavy political pressure (and probably with the help of financial
inducements) the Dutch betrayed them and handed over as many as they
could catch to Clarendon, who had them executed, their heads displayed
in Whitehall. Thurloe’s Europe-wide spy network was preserved more
or less intact.

The French Revolution had a Jacobin equivalent of Thurloe: less
straightforwardly a spymaster, he exercised just as much ideological
control. Joseph Fouché was born in 1759 in a village near Nantes and
educated at the city oratory. Unlike Thurloe he was not a civil
servant but an ambitious revolutionary politician. He had always been
an ardent Jacobin, particularly interested in the de-Christianisation
campaign, which began in earnest under his leadership in 1793. He
closed down churches, installed a bust of Brutus on the altar of the
cathedral in Nevers and paraded a real dancing woman down the nave of
Notre Dame to represent the Goddess of Reason. Inscriptions
proclaiming that ‘la mort est un éternel sommeil’ – rather than
something God could rescue you from – were displayed at the entrance
of cemeteries. Religious burials were banned. Sacred objects –
‘ornaments of fanaticism and ignorance’ – were removed from
churches and a number of Fouché’s supporters urged Catholic priests
to get married: celibacy was out.

Robespierre, busy creating several Republican armies to combat the
external military threats to revolutionary France, was unsettled by
this display of secular fanaticism, both on principle and for reasons
of Realpolitik. He was worried that it would upset the neutral states
in Europe and unnecessarily alienate sections of the peasantry. He
publicly excoriated Fouché’s excesses in Lyon, where he had crushed
a Girondin revolt with startling ferocity. The subsequent public
executions of sixty bankers, nobles and hangers-on were preceded by a
vicious satirical and semi-pornographic tableau mocking the Virgin
Birth, the Resurrection and the Holy Ghost. ‘The man who is
determined to prevent religious worship is just as fanatical as the
man who says Mass,’ Robespierre said. ‘The Convention will not
allow persecution of peaceable ministers of religion, but it will
punish them severely every time they dare to take advantage of their
position to deceive the citizens or to arm bigotry and royalism
against the Republic.’

Fouché went on the offensive and helped topple Robespierre, imagining
he would replace him. But the events of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794)
marked a turning point in the revolution. What had initially appeared
to be a struggle for power within the Jacobin Party sounded the death
knell for the radicals. Thermidor led to the victory first of the
Directory, then the Consulate and, finally, the Empire, with the
bourgeoisie now firmly in command. Fouché served all three as
minister for police, falling out with Napoleon over the plan to invade
Russia, which he regarded as a combination of personal vanity and
politico-military folly. Enraged, Napoleon sacked him. But neither
harboured a grudge. After Napoleon escaped from Elba, Fouché was made
de facto prime minister and attempted to stabilise the administration.
Waterloo put an end to all that. Fouché died peacefully in his bed in
1820. Thurloe had similarly passed away in his chambers at Lincoln’s
Inn in 1667, a pattern that would, alas, not be repeated in the Soviet
Union.

Jan Karlovich Berzin (born Pēteris Ķuzis in 1889) recruited the
first generation of Soviet spies. From a Latvian peasant family, he
participated in the 1905 Revolution that swept the country soon after
the crushing defeat inflicted on the tsarist navy by imperial Japan
and in 1906 he was elected secretary of the St Petersburg branch of
the RSDLP. He was arrested by the Cossacks and sentenced to death, but
spared because of his age. He served two spells in Siberia and
escaped. After the October Revolution he was given the task of
organising Red Guards to defend the Bolshevik leaders, and following
Fanny Kaplan’s assassination attempt on Lenin in August 1918 he set
up a bodyguard composed of Latvians, Finns, Russians and Chinese
migrant workers. In 1920, he became head of the GRU.

The short biographical sketch of Berzin in _An Impeccable
Spy_ contains some mistakes, but Matthews’s most important error is
to seek to distinguish Berzin from the people he recruited. They, he
claims, were idealists, dreamers, intellectuals, well-meaning types.
Berzin, in contrast, was a ruthless, violent protégé of Dzerzhinsky,
head of the much feared Cheka. Wrong. All the major achievements of
the Fourth Department, as Soviet military intelligence came to be
known (penetration of the British Foreign Office and intelligence in
the 1920s, the creation of the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra, which
had spies in the highest echelons of the German military both in
Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, and Sorge’s astonishing successes
in Japan in the 1930s), were planned in detail by Berzin. In _Great
Game,_ his memoir of the period, Leopold Trepper, who co-ordinated
the Rote Kapelle network in Belgium and France, writes that Berzin was
‘universally respected’. He ‘never left his men in the lurch,
never would he have sacrificed a single one’. ‘To him, the agents
were human beings and, above all, communists.’ He recounts a
conversation between Berzin and Sorge, as reported to him by Sorge
(all of them were taught how to memorise messages and conversations).
Berzin, Trepper recalled, had summoned Sorge from China just after
Hitler’s triumph in 1933. Berzin had no doubt as to the consequences
of that victory. He cut to the chase:

BERZIN: What, in your opinion, is the greatest danger the Soviet Union
faces at this time?

SORGE: Even if we grant a confrontation with Japan, I think the real
threat comes from Nazi Germany.

BERZIN: Well that’s why we sent for you. We want you to take up
residence in Japan.

SORGE: Why?

BERZIN: Rapprochement between Germany and Japan is coming; in Tokyo
you will learn a great deal about military preparations.

SORGE: What? Go to Japan and become a spy? But I’m a journalist!

BERZIN: You say you don’t want to be a spy, but what’s your idea
of a spy? What you call a ‘spy’ is a man who tries to get
information about the weak points of the enemy so that his government
can exploit them. We aren’t looking for war, but we want to know
about the enemy’s preparations and detect the chinks in his armour
so we won’t be caught short if he should attack. Our objective is
for you to create a group in Japan determined to fight for peace. Your
work will be to recruit important Japanese, and you will do everything
in your power to see that their country is not dragged into a war
against the Soviet Union.

SORGE: What name will I use?

BERZIN: Your own.

Sorge was stunned. Even Berzin’s assistants were taken aback,
reminding their chief that Sorge had a police record in Germany. He
had been a member of the German Communist Party at the end of the
First World War before moving to the Soviet Union. Berzin knew it was
risky to make Sorge play a German Nazi, but, as he argued,

a man always walks better in his own shoes. I’m also aware that the
Nazis have just inherited the police files. But a lot of water will
flow under the bridges of the Moskva before Sorge’s file comes to
light … Even if the Nazis find out sooner than we expect, what’s
to keep a man who was a communist 15 years ago from changing his
political opinion?

Then he turned to an assistant: ‘Arrange to have him hired as the
Tokyo correspondent of the _Frankfurter Zeitung_.’ ‘You see, this
way you’ll feel at home and not as if you’re playing spy,’ he
told Sorge.

Sorge went to Berlin in May 1933 and spent the next three months
fulfilling the tasks set for him. He joined the Nazi Party, obtained a
German passport – his profession declared as ‘journalist’ –
and was accredited as the Tokyo correspondent of the _Frankfurter
Zeitung._ He made a favourable impression on the publisher and editor
of _Zeitschrift für Geopolitik_ and from them got letters of
introduction to key figures in the German embassy in Tokyo and to
useful Germans living in the city.

Similar instructions were given, possibly by Ludwik, the third of
these Soviet spies, who probably recruited Kim Philby, to Philby,
Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Philby dropped all his
communist contacts and joined the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship,
which made it easier for him to get access to Franco’s forces in
Spain as a ‘journalist’. Berzin and Ludwik were both in Spain in
1936, in the hope that a victory for the Spanish Republic would weaken
the Axis powers. It was not to be. Berzin was recalled to Moscow in
June 1937 and resumed his post as head of military intelligence. To
his enormous credit he confronted Stalin with the realities of the
Spanish Civil War and registered strong complaints against the
NKVD’s murders of dissident communists such as the POUM leader,
Andrés Nin, and others on the left. He must have known what lay
ahead. Arrested by the NKVD later that year, he was shot in the
cellars of the Lubyanka in July 1938. He was posthumously
rehabilitated in 1956. Ludwik wrote to Stalin in July 1937, returning
his medals, condemning the purges and the NKVD’s killings. He then
went into hiding in Switzerland, but was tricked into a meeting with a
fellow agent and murdered a few weeks later. Twenty years ago I met
his son, who showed me his father’s bullet-pierced wallet.

Sorge avoided returning to Moscow, where he might well have met a
similar fate, but as a disciplined cadre continued with his mission:
whatever the cost, the Japanese empire must be prevented from joining
the coming war against the Soviet Union. Most of his achievements are
related in _An Impeccable Spy_. He quickly penetrated the German
community of journalists and businessmen in Tokyo and became a close
friend of General Eugen Ott, who was appointed Germany’s ambassador
to Japan in 1938, and his wife, Helma, who had fallen in love with him
(Ott knew Sorge was sleeping with his wife, but seems to have
tolerated it in the belief that women found Sorge irresistible). The
German embassy in Tokyo became a second base of operations for him. It
was in the ambassador’s safe that he later discovered details of the
plans for Operation Barbarossa – Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet
Union. He sent the information to Filipp Golikov in Moscow, where
Stalin had wiped out most of his opponents in the Bolshevik Party,
including almost every member of the 1917 Central Committee to which
Berzin had belonged. Golikov, a timeserver by any standard, was in a
state of permanent fright.

As Matthews reveals, Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Scholl of German
military intelligence, who was stationed at the Tokyo embassy,
returned from Berlin in May 1941. The news he brought back was
sensational and Ott wasted no time in sharing it with Sorge. On 31
May, Sorge cabled Golikov:

Berlin informed Ott that the German attack will commence in the latter
part of June. Ott 95 per cent certain that war will commence …
Because of the existence of a powerful Red Army, Germany has no
possibility to widen the sphere of war in Africa and has to maintain a
large army in Eastern Europe. In order to eliminate all the dangers
from the USSR side, Germany has to drive off the Red Army as soon as
possible.

Ott had provided the barest of outlines, but Scholl provided the
information in full: 170-180 mechanised divisions were already close
to the Soviet border, he said, and the assault itself would encompass
the entire front. The German general staff had few doubts that the Red
Army would collapse and they would take Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev.
Hitler would then take over the Trans-Siberian railway and establish
direct contact with the Japanese forces in Manchuria. Stalin, still
basking in the so-called triumph of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, refused to
believe any of it. ‘You can send your “source” … to his
fucking mother,’ he told Golikov. On the message itself he
scribbled: ‘Suspicious. To be listed with telegrams intended as
provocations.’ (Matthews writes that in 1961 Golikov and Marshal
Zhukov, whose troops had liberated Berlin, went to see the Moscow
screening of a film called _Qui êtes-vous, Monsieur
Sorge?_ Afterwards, Zhukov confronted Golikov: ‘Why, Filipp
Ivanovich, did you hide these reports from me? Why did you not report
such information to the chief of the general staff?’ Golikov
replied: ‘What if this Sorge was a double agent, both ours and
theirs?)

At around the same time, Sorge found out from his Japanese contacts
that Japan was not going to invade the Soviet Union and was instead
targeting the United States. This enabled Moscow to withdraw crucial
divisions from the Far East, helping to frustrate the German attack on
Moscow. Sorge had got much of this information from Ozaki Hotsumi, a
journalist close to the Japanese prime minister. ‘Considered simply
as spies,’ Chalmers Johnson wrote in _An Instance of Treason: Ozaki
Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring_, ‘Ozaki and his partner, Richard
Sorge (PhD, Political Science, University of Hamburg, 8 August 1920),
were possibly the most intellectually overqualified spies in modern
history. Neither was a spy for financial gain; their motivations were
political.’ Ozaki’s influence was based on his knowledge of
Chinese politics and culture: he lived there for several years and
wrote a number of sympathetic books and numerous essays on post-Sun
Yat-sen China. For a while he had supported the notion of a
Japanese-Chinese alliance that would drive the European empires out of
Asia, but a closer look at the nationalists of the Kuomintang and the
Japanese military leadership cured his illusions. Ozaki saw the KMT as
clannish and corrupt, and predicted that the Chinese communists would
ultimately defeat them. When Sorge suggested to Ozaki that he should
argue for the entire Japanese army to be sent to China, where they
would sooner or later be defeated, he presented this hallucinatory
notion as allowing three victories: Japan’s defeat would open up the
country to a revolutionary uprising; only the Chinese communists were
capable of defeating the Japanese empire; the Soviet Union’s eastern
border would be secured. Ozaki said bluntly that it was a bad idea,
not worth the risk. Neither was aware that the hardcore military
faction backed by the emperor was planning an attack on Pearl Harbor,
a decision that meant restricting the number of armed forces they sent
to China, ignoring the Soviet Union and concentrating on weakening
American power in the Pacific.

*

Even without the Japanese opening a second front on the USSR’s
eastern border, the Germans almost pulled off a victory. Sorge’s
messages had been ignored, the best Soviet military leaders, including
Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had been executed, and despite the military
superiority of the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe almost
took Moscow and Leningrad in the first wave attack. According to John
Erickson, a historian of the Red Army, Tukhachevsky had carried out
manoeuvres that predicted the lines of a German attack as early as
1933. In his last off the record question and answer session,
restricted to senior Red Army officers, he again insisted that the
Germans were preparing a military assault. They would strike suddenly,
he said, and deploy everything available on land, sea and air to take
the Red Army by surprise. He was accused of treason and shot in June
1937.

Contrary to popular legend, at no point did the Wehrmacht possess
military superiority over the Red Army on the frontier. On the
contrary, Soviet superiority was staggering: seven to one in tanks,
with 24,600 in readiness against 3500 Panzers, four to one in planes.
‘As for the Blitzkrieg which is so propagandised by the Germans,
this is directed towards an enemy who doesn’t want to and won’t
fight it out,’ Tukhachevsky had claimed:

If the Germans meet an opponent who stands up and fights and takes the
offensive himself, that would give a different aspect to things. The
struggle would be bitter and protracted; by its very nature it would
induce great fluctuations in the front on this or that side and in
great depth. In the final resort, all would depend on who had the
greater moral fibre and who at the close of the operations disposed of
operational reserves in depth.

Unlike the Germans, who saw the Nazi-Soviet Pact as necessary but
temporary, Stalin had illusions that it might be lasting. Matthews
quotes from a 1966 interview with Zhukov, conducted by Lev Bezymensky,
a Soviet historian and war veteran. In January 1941, Zhukov and others
had warned Stalin of ominous German troop movements. Stalin wrote to
Hitler, asking politely whether these reports were true. Hitler
replied that they were, but he swore

on my honour as a head of state that my troops are deployed … for
other purposes. The territories of Western and Central Germany are
subject to heavy English bombing and are easily observed from the air
by the English. Therefore I found it necessary to move large
contingents of troops to the east where they can secretly reorganise
and rearm.

Stalin believed him.

Zhukov told Bezymensky that in early June 1941 it was obvious to most
of the high command that the Germans were preparing to invade. He had
showed Stalin ‘staff maps with the locations of enemy troops entered
on them’.

A few days passed and Stalin called for me … he opened a case on his
desk and took out several sheets of paper. ‘Read,’ said Stalin …
it was a letter from Stalin to Hitler in which he briefly outlined his
concern over the German deployments … Stalin then said ‘Here is
the answer’ … I cannot exactly reproduce Hitler’s words. But
this I do remember precisely: I read the 14 June issue
of _Pravda_ and in it, to my amazement, I discovered the same words
I had read in Hitler’s letter to Stalin.

It was Molotov who broke the news of the invasion to Soviet citizens.
For a fortnight, Stalin made no public appearance. Finally, he
addressed the nation. His speech was leaden at the start, but improved
as he went on, even if its ideology and language were reminiscent of
1812 rather than 1917. He pledged fierce resistance and a scorched
earth policy. As the emotional victory parade approached, when the
captured flags and regimental banners of Nazi Germany were flung on
the ground below Lenin’s mausoleum, he proposed a toast to the
Russian people at the Kremlin banquet and made this apology:

Our government made not a few errors, we experienced at moments a
desperate situation in 1941-42, when our army was retreating,
abandoning our own villages and towns of the Ukraine, Belorussia,
Moldova, the Leningrad region, the Baltic area and the Karelo-Finnish
Republic, abandoning them because there was no other way out. A
different people could have said to the government: ‘You have failed
to justify our expectations. Go away. We shall install another
government which will conclude peace with Germany …’ The Russian
people, however, did not take this path … Thanks to it, to the
Russian people, for this confidence!

In the updated 2001 edition of _The Soviet High Command,_ Erickson
makes clear that the Red Army’s response wasn’t a foregone
conclusion:

The system lived perpetually on a narrow knife-edge. How frighteningly
narrow was brought home to me in a singular exchange with Chief
Marshal of Artillery N.N. Voronov … Knowing he was present at the
very centre of events during the early hours of Sunday, 22 June, I
asked him for his interpretation. His final remark was quite
astonishing. He said that at about 7.30 a.m. the high command had
received encouraging news: the Red Army was fighting back. The worst
nightmare had already been overcome. Red Army soldiers had gone to
war, ‘the system’ had responded and would respond.

Arming the people in Moscow and Leningrad prevented the fall of the
two key cities of the revolution, and in Stalingrad and Kursk the Red
Army broke the backbone of the Third Reich. Despite everything, Soviet
resistance was decisive in defeating Hitler. The price was 27,000,000
dead, countless numbers disabled. Many who tried their best to ensure
a victory at a lesser price had been killed before Barbarossa even
began, murdered, in the words of Ludwik’s widow, ‘by our own
people’.

Sorge had sent Golikov the details of Operation Barbarossa, but he was
slandered and ignored. In October 1941, after the Japanese had become
suspicious that a spy ring was in operation and had succeeded in
intercepting some of Sorge’s messages, he and Ozaki were arrested.
He spent two years in prison. The Japanese offered to exchange him
three times but Stalin refused. He was hanged in Sugamo Prison in
Tokyo on 7 November 1943, a few hours after Ozaki. It was the
anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Trepper was arrested in Paris in December 1942 and a year later
escaped from prison. After the liberation of Paris he made his way
back to Moscow, where he was arrested as a double agent. He was
released in May 1954, less than a year after Stalin’s death. He
returned to his native Poland, though he had no family left there: the
entire Jewish population of Nowy Targ had been put on a train to
Auschwitz. But antisemitism persisted in Poland and he eventually left
for Israel – where, unlike Berzin, Ludwik, Sorge and many others, he
died a natural death. In the epilogue to his memoirs he writes: ‘I
do not regret the commitment of my youth. I do not regret the paths I
have taken … I know that youth will succeed where we have failed,
that socialism will triumph, and that it will not have the colour of
the Russian tanks that crushed Prague.’

A few months after Chalmers Johnson’s book was published in 1964
Sorge was rehabilitated and made a Hero of the Soviet Union. A
Post-Constructivist statue of him was erected in his native Baku, and
a postage stamp issued. When Yuri Andropov was head of the KGB and a
member of the Politburo in the early 1980s, he called in a popular
thriller writer called Julian Semyonov and gave him access to some of
the files on Trepper and the Red Orchestra. In the resulting
thriller, _The Red Mole_, the hero, Issaev, penetrates the highest
levels of the Nazi hierarchy.​＊
[[link removed]] Leonid
Brezhnev was so taken by the book that he wanted Issaev to be honoured
posthumously. Andropov had to explain that he was a fictional
construct. Ludwik alone was left to bask in obscurity.
 

_Book author OWEN MATTHEWS is a British writer, historian and
journalist. His first book, Stalin's Children, was shortlisted for the
2008 Guardian First Books Award,[1]
[[link removed]] the Orwell
Prize [[link removed]] for political
writing,[2] [[link removed]]
and France's Prix Medicis [[link removed]]
Etranger[3] [[link removed]]
His books have been translated into 28 languages. He is a former
Moscow and Istanbul Bureau Chief for Newsweek Magazine
[[link removed]]. Matthews has
lectured on Russian history and politics at Columbia University
[[link removed]]'s Harriman
Centre,[4] [[link removed]]
St Antony's College
[[link removed]] Oxford,[5]
[[link removed]] and the
Journalism Faculty of Moscow State University._

_[Essayist TARIQ ALI’s latest book is The Dilemmas of Lenin:
Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution. (Verso). A British political
activist, writer, journalist, historian, filmmaker, and public
intellectual, Ali is a member of the editorial committee of the New
Left Review and Sin Permiso, and contributes to The Guardian,
CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books. A sizable collection of
his LRB work appears HERE
[[link removed]]. ]_

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