Home Excerpts Appendices Literature Links Contacts
You are here: [http://www.richardsorge.com/] >> [Excerpts from the chronology] >> [1996]

1996
Edvard Radzinsky's Stalin is published. The book, based on new documents uncovered in many of Russia's heretofore closed archives, asserts that Stalin was allowed to die by his closest confidants out of the fear that a new "Great Purge" and perhaps a pogrom against the Jews was in the works. Moreover, he believes that Stalin was laying the plans to incite a Third World War. The book also claims that Stalin and Hitler met secretly on October 16-17, 1939, in Lvov, Poland to revise their Non-aggression Pact. Finally, Radzinsky believes that, even though caught off-guard, Stalin was planning his own attack against the Nazis. He was "convinced that time was on his side," and that Hitler wouldn't "make such a mad move.294 Moreover, Stalin was, to an extent, rightfully suspicious of Churchill's warnings of an impending German attack. The British needed the Soviets to join the war against the Germans. England's survival depended upon it.
294 Former Soviet spy, best-selling author, and Cold War defector Colonel Vladimir Rezun, aka Victor Suvorov, argues that Stalin was planning to attack Hitler on July 6, 1941 - two weeks too late. (See also July 6, 1941).
September 30
Former CIA Agent Charles McCarry, now an editor at U.S. News & World Report, states that Sorge "learned the date of the Pearl Harbor attack and informed Stalin..." 295 (U.S. News & World Report, September 30, 1996)
295 I should mention that in a subsequent exchange with McCarry through an editor at the U.S.News & World Report, McCarry said that his information on Sorge came from research done during the 1960s. It is possible that some of his information came from his work at the CIA.