MOSCOW, December 14. /TASS/. The Sakhalin Regional Duma has unanimously voted to support a proposal, put forward by a group of activists, for calling a nameless cape of one of the Southern Kuril islands after the legendary Soviet intelligence officer Richard Sorge, the regional legislature’s press service has said.
"At today’s meeting of the committee for statehood, rules of procedure and local self-government the legislators considered a proposal, submitted by the Sakhalin branch of the national non-governmental organization Russian Geographic Society, for assigning the name Sorge to a nameless cape of the Yuri island (the Lesser Kuril Chain). The committee supported the proposal unanimously. The Sakhalin Region’s residents are invited to express their consent or disagreement till February 5, 2022," the news release reads.
The Russian Geographic Society explored the nameless cape in question in September 2016.
On orders from the Soviet military intelligence German Communist Richard Sorge arrived in Japan in 1933 to create an effective intelligence gathering network. He enjoyed credibility with the embassy of Hitler’s Germany in Tokyo and received access to classified information from the very top of the Japanese political establishment.
Sorge (operating under the codename Ramsay) was one of the first ones to inform Moscow about an approximate date when Nazi Germany would attack the Soviet Union. His messages confirming that Japan would not join the war against the Soviet Union in 1941 were of still greater value. Historians believe they made a great contribution to the Soviet Union’s victory in the battle of Moscow. Japan’s counter-intelligence arrested Sorge on October 18, 1941. After long interrogations he was sentenced to death and hanged on November 7, 1944. In 1964, Sorge was posthumously awarded the title of the Hero of the Soviet Union.