Aino Kuusinen and Richarad Sorge, and Myself

Aino Kuusinen appears in many places of “Stalin’s Spy.” And I somewhat find myself in the following passages:

Richard was not an easy person to live with, Christiane had discovered. He was self-contained, with deep inner resources, and although he was fond of her, she could as easily have lived without her. ‘No one, ever could violate the inner solitude, it was this which gave him complete independence – and perhaps explained the hold had had over people.’ (p. 26, Stalin’s Spy)

The tiny German community did not provide the intellectual and cultural nourishment he craved, or satisfying comradeship: he complained repeatedly that he had ‘no friends.’

During his seven years in Japan we sense that Sorge keenly felt himself to be the sad wanderer of the poem written in his student days – ‘eternally a stranger who condemns himself never to know peace’. (p. 119, Stalin’s Spy)