In Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy (2020), Ben Macintyre describes the evolution of Ursula Kuczynski, from an incipient revolutionary into a career of one of the most successful Soviet spies before, during, and after World War II.
Time of great conflict & revolution
Between two world wars, fascism was on the rise throughout Europe and Asia. Germany was roiling with street battles between fascists, the German Communist Party, and the Social Democratic Party.
A wide gulf existed between the ultra-rich and everyone else. The Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, was characterized by mass unemployment, economic insecurity, and savage political conflict. In one year alone, 1918-1919, roughly 900,000 Germans died of hunger. In 1920, the Nazi Party was founded. A year later Adolf Hitler became its leader. On January 1, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht founded the German Communist Party but were captured and assassinated by right-wing German army officers, possibly sanctioned by leaders of the anti-communist Social Democratic Party.
In July, 1921 the Chinese Communist Party was organized in Shanghai. In 1927 a leader of the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang Kai-shek, broke with the communists. In one day, on April 12, 1927, KMT military forces allied with local criminal gangs, killed 5,000 - 10,000 students and workers loyal to the communists.
The capitalist world after World War I, from Europe to Japan, was dominated by militarists, fascist heads of state, and their financial backers, all of whom espoused various forms of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, jingoism, militarism, and imperial conquest.
The critical difference between the 1920s-‘30s in Europe and today was the existence of an international communist movement. The result of the Bolshevik revolution in November, 1917, was that the working class, led by the Bolshevik (communist) Party,, held sway in the largest country in the world. And the Bolshevik’s goal was to create an anti-racist society of equality rather than one based on private property and profit
During the 1920s and early 1930s revolutionary communist movements in Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and China were battling the fascists for state power. The Comintern and the Soviet Union gave material and ideological support to these struggles.
Ursula Kuczynski
Into this political and social cauldron, Ursula Kuczynski was born in 1907 to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin. When she was sixteen she was beaten by the police in Berlin during a May Day demonstration, learning a lesson she would never forget: politics is at bottom a power struggle, most often decided by mortal combat.
Ursula Kuczynski was a professional spy who ran agents and networks against the fascists in her own country, in Japanese-occupied China, in Poland, Switzerland, and then, during the Cold War period, in Great Britain. She eventually became a Red Army colonel and, among her other espionage successes, ran Klaus Fuchs, the German physicist who enabled the USSR to get the atomic bomb, thus breaking the American monopoly on atomic weaponry.
After the Second World War she continued to spy for Moscow. Often suspected, she was never caught. In 1943 the Director of Soviet intelligence said this about her: “If we had five Sonyas in England, the war would be over sooner.”
Forever a communist
She died in Germany on July 7, 2000, age ninety-three. Her son, Peter, summed up his mother’s long life this way: “There were two important things to her, her children and the communist cause.”
Urusla Kuczynski was also called Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton, Mrs. Burton, and Ursula Hamburger, but her most enduring name, her spy name, was Sonya.
The book Agent Sonya is fascinating because it contextualizes how from the 1920s to her death nearly eighty years later, a young woman born into a rich family became a radical communist and never relinquished her commitment to fighting fascism and trying to bring a socialist world into being. In February 1950, she chose to live in socialist East Germany rather than England. She believed that, however deeply flawed it was, East Germany was a more humane place than capitalist West Germany, where thanks to the Western Allies Nazi murderers remained in power. Such ideas of lesser-evil politics were a key characteristic of the old communist movement and this weakness led to its failure.
Revolutionary optimism
Even as the GDR was falling apart in 1990, Ursula reaffirmed her basic belief in communist principles. “I have no reason to feel ashamed on moral or ethical grounds.”
Her enemy had always been fascism, and “for that reason I hold my head up high.”
Even as East Germany was about to dissolve, Agent Sonya addressed a huge rally in Berlin telling the crowd not to lose faith: “Go and become part of the Party, work in it, change the future, work as clean socialists! I have courage. I am optimistic because I know it will happen.”
Learning from the victories and mistakes of the old movement, PLP fights directly for communism. We carry with us a revolutionary optimism that reminds us that however dark the current era of class struggle, we have courage because we too know communism is the future.