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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hughes, Lindsey. (1988). “’Ambitious and Daring Above her Sex’: Tsarevna Sophia Alekseevna (1657-1704) in Foreigners’ Accounts.” Oxford Slavonic Papers 21: 65-89. Hughes, Lindsey. (1990). Sophia.: Regent of Russia., 1657-1704. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thyret, Isolde. (2000). Between God and Tsar. Religious Symbolism and Royal Women of Muscovite Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
(1895-1944), Soviet spy.
Richard Sorge was born to a German family in Baku. His father was a petroleum engineer and his grandfather, Friedrich Sorge (1828-1906), a colENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
league of Marx. In 1910 the family returned to Germany, where Sorge later studied in Berlin and Hamburg Universities. Drafted into the German army, he was a participant in World War I, and the combat experience converted him to socialism. In 1919 he joined the Communist Party of Germany. He held various positions as teacher and miner before returning to the Soviet Union in 1924, where a year later he joined the Communist Party and worked for various institutions before joining the military intelligence (GRU) in 1929. His duties took him to London and Los Angeles, and in 1930 to China. Returning to Germany, he established contacts with the military intelligence and Gestapo and was sent undercover as a journalist to Tokyo, and eventually as the press attach? in the German embassy. His scandalous life, which included heavy drinking and several affairs, served as a cover for his activities as a Soviet agent. The German military attach? was the source of much information, and through him, Sorge found out the plans for Operation Barbarrossa and duly informed Moscow. This news went counter to Josef Stalin’s belief, who did not anticipate war in 1941, and he even thought Sorge was a double agent. Beria also discounted similar reports from his own agents in Germany, which confirmed Sorge’s warnings. The end result was the greatest military disaster to befall the Soviet Union, when Hitler attacked as Sorge had reported. In his work, Sorge received help from the Japanese communists and from his radio operator, Max Klausen (1899-1979). Born in Germany, Klausen immigrated to the Soviet Union in 1927 and a year later joined the military intelligence. After serving in China, he was sent to Japan in September 1935, where he joined up with Sorge. Like Sorge, he was arrested in 1941, but he survived and lived in East Germany.
Sorge’s loose life finally brought him to the attention of the Japanese counterintelligence, which arrested him in October 1941. After two years in prison, Sorge was sentenced to death on September 29, 1943, and was hanged. There is no evidence that the Soviet government in any way intervened in his behalf, and in fact, Sorge’s long- suffering wife, E. A. Maximova (1909-1943), was arrested (September 4, 1942) by the NKVD and perished in prison camp. Only during Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw were Sorge’s services to the Soviet Union recognized, and on November 11, 1962, he was posthumously awarded the title of hero of the Soviet Union, and his wife was rehabilitated. Sorge’s life has been subject of numerous books, but his legacy remains that of one of the greatest intelligence
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coups of all time gone to waste because those in the position of power failed to heed it. See also: MILITARY INTELLIGENTSIA; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF; WORLD WAR II
Johnson, Chalmers. (1990). An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Tokyo Spy Ring. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Whymant, Robert. (1996). Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Spy Ring. London: I. B. Tauris.
The sorokoust, or forty divine liturgies (i.e., eu-charistic services), is a series of orthodox liturgical commemorations celebrated in memory of a dead person.
The number forty derives from the Orthodox tradition that it takes the soul forty days to reach the throne of God. Because of the similarity in sound, it is sometimes thought that the term is connected to the Russian sorok, “forty,” and usta, “month,” but in fact it derives from the Middle Greek sarakoste, “forty” (ancient Greek thessarakoste). The forty liturgies are part of the standard Orthodox ritual for the dead, corresponding genetically and functionally to the Catholic tricenarius, or thirty masses. A tale from the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) about the helpfulness of the thirty masses for the souls of the departed (bk. IV, chap. 57) appears in Greek and Russian manuscripts with the number changed to forty. The first Old Russian sources that mention the sorokoust date from twelfth-century Novgorod. Canonical texts decry the practice of arranging for sorokousty in advance of a person’s death or even of celebrating them while the person is still alive. Last wills and testaments from Muscovite Russia frequently provide for comparatively small donations to be distributed by the departed’s executor to as many as forty churches where sorokousty were to be celebrated for the departed. A more limited version of the sorokoust, a commemoration in the regular liturgy for forty days, is still practiced in the early twenty- first century in Russian Orthodox churches. See also: ORTHODOXY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SINODIK
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Steindorff, Ludwig. (1994). Memoria in Altru?land. Stuttgart: Steiner.
(b. 1949), industrialist, inventor, powerful minister in the Russian government from 1993 to 1996.
Trained as a metallurgical engineer, from 1971 until 1991 Oleg Soskovets worked at the Karaganda Metallurgical Factory in Kazakhstan, rising from the shop floor to become the general director in 1988. In 1991 a police investigation of financial abuses led to the arrest of several of his colleagues, but he himself was not prosecuted.
In 1989 he was elected to the newly formed USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, and in 1991 he served briefly as minister of metallurgy in the USSR government. In January 1992 President Boris Yeltsin named him to head a state metallurgy commission, but that spring he was made deputy prime minister and minister of industry in the government of Kazakhstan. Again, he left after a few months, when the attorney general’s office reopened the factory corruption case.
Named to head a state committee on metallurgy, Soskovets returned to Moscow in October 1992, only for Yeltsin five months later to appoint him deputy prime minister and overseer of Russian industry. He became close to Yeltsin’s security aide Alexander Korzhakov and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, and chaired government meetings in the latter’s absence. He was a hawk on the first Chechnya war, and in February 1995 Yeltsin sent him to Chechnya with the thankless task of restoring economic and social life in the still war-torn republic. Later, unanswered allegations suggested that he had profited handsomely from the government cash sent to Chechnya for reconstruction.
Over time, Korzhakov started pressing Yeltsin to replace Chernomyrdin with Soskovets. In January 1996 Yeltsin named him to head the campaign for Yeltsin’s reelection. However, Soskovets and Korzhakov favored postponement of the election, fearing that Yeltsin might lose. Eventually forced into a runoff, Yeltsin fired them both in June.
After this, Soskovets became an assistant to Mayor Yuri Luzhkov of Moscow and continued his
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work for the Association of Financial-Industrial Groups, of which he became chairman in 1995. Press and TV expos?s linked him to allegedly criminal activity by the Mafia-connected brothers Mikhail and Lev Chernoi, colleagues of his in the metals industry. Although he made no effective response to the charges, he was not prosecuted. See also: KORZHAKOV, ALEXANDER VASILIEVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
