Early Life
Sorge was born in the settlement of Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku, Azerbaijan, which was part of Imperial Russia at the time. He was the youngest of nine children of Wilhelm Richard Sorge (d. 1907), a German mining engineer, and his Russian wife Nina Semionovna Kobieleva. His father's lucrative contract with the Caucasian Oil Company having expired, Richard Sorge's family moved back to Germany: in Sorge's own words,
"The one thing that made my life a little different from the average was a strong awareness of the fact that I had been born in the southern Caucasus and that we had moved to Berlin when I was very small."
The cosmopolitan Sorge household was "very different from the average bourgeois home in Berlin."
Although Sorge considered Friedrich Adolf Sorge, an associate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to be his grandfather, he was in fact his great-uncle.
In October 1914 Sorge volunteered to serve during World War I. He joined a student battalion of the 3rd Guards, Field Artillery. During his service in the Western Front he was severely wounded in March 1916 when shrapnel cut off three of his fingers and broke both his legs, causing a lifelong limp. He was promoted to corporal, received an Iron Cross and was later medically discharged.
During his convalescence he read Marx and adopted communist ideology, mainly due to the influence of the father of a nurse with whom he had developed a relationship. He spent the rest of the war studying economics at the universities of Berlin, Kiel and Hamburg. Sorge received a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Hamburg in August 1919. He also joined the Communist Party of Germany. His political views, however, got him fired from both a teaching job and coal mining work. He fled to Moscow where he became a junior agent for the Comintern.
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