The short period of calm between the two world wars (1918–1939) was eventful and filled with figures that modern man should look at with envy and shame - there was so much boiling energy in those people, overflowing, but not dousing the fire, and adding to it the oil of fiery ideas and transcendental adventurism in the best sense of the word. Politicians and spies, beauties and monsters in human form filled the prosceniums of world capitals, clashed in the battles of the “Nazi” and “commie” ideologies, knights of the cape fought in the dark backstage daggers, steel armadas were riveted in hot workshops, which were soon to become tank wedges, cutting like butter the expanses of European and Asian powers. In this turmoil of the interwar truce, Richard Sorge felt like a fish in water. An agent of the Comintern, a Soviet intelligence officer, a talented journalist, a perspicacious analyst, a charming lover and a faithful comrade, he alone was worth, as Stalin put it, an entire division. But do we know everything about one of the most mysterious spies of the 20th century and who he really was? What beliefs motivated him? The love for which of the two homelands - Russia and Germany - was stronger in his heart? Who betrayed the Ramsay group? Why was Sorge considered a double agent in the USSR? And why were there people who believed they had seen Spy No. 1 alive and well several years after he was executed by the Japanese? What actually happened to the man who told Stalin the exact day the war began? Evgeniy Tolstoy’s book gives answers to some questions and immediately poses others - apparently, this is the fate of everything connected with Richard Sorge.