On September 6, 1998, the Japanese national newspaper Asahi named Richard Sorge among the hundred outstanding people of the twentieth century, despite the fact that this man violated Japanese laws and was executed as a criminal - the first foreigner in the entire history of modern Japan. Such recognition is not accidental, because in Japan, as elsewhere in the world, true heroes are valued, and the Japanese considered Sorge worthy of being included in this list. Do we truly appreciate Sorge today? More than half a century has passed since he was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the country he served has disappeared, moral guidelines and ideas about the world order have changed. Remembering Sorge, many are increasingly asking questions: was he really a hero? Was German intelligence chief Schellenberg right when he called Sorge a double agent? Or maybe it’s even simpler: Sorge is a greatly overrated womanizer and drinker, to whom only mythical merits are attributed, such as the sore warning to Stalin about Germany’s attack on the USSR? And why, by the way, did Stalin not believe him? How could Ramsay's Tokyo station fail if its leader was such an outstanding intelligence officer? And by the way, what happened before – before Tokyo? The answers to these and many other questions are contained here in this book, the first scientific, impartial, but maximally objective biography of Richard Sorge, written on a strictly documentary basis by the historian Alexander Kulanov, noted for his research in the field of confrontation between the Japanese and Soviet intelligence services with awards from the Ministry of Defense and FSB of Russia.