永遠の今eternal now

In the winter of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. The Soviets had one of the largest armies on Earth. Finland had a few hundred thousand men, not much artillery, and almost no tanks. What Finland had was snow, forests, and a 5 foot 3 inch farmer named Simo Häyhä. Before the war, Häyhä was a quiet man from a small village near the Soviet border. He farmed. He hunted. He'd served his required time in the army and joined Finland's civil guard, where he became known as a crack shot in shooting competitions. When the Soviets crossed the border in November 1939, he was sent to the front near the Kollaa River. The temperatures there dropped to 20, 30, even 40 degrees below zero. Days were short. Most of the light was gone by mid afternoon. Häyhä thrived in it. He dressed completely in white so he disappeared into the snow. He'd head out before dawn with a little food and stay out all day, lying motionless in the cold, waiting. He used an old Finnish version of the Mosin-Nagant rifle. With iron sights. No scope. That was on purpose. A scope's glass could catch the sunlight and give away his position. It also meant he had to raise his head higher to aim, and in freezing weather the glass could fog up. Iron sights let him stay lower and stay hidden. He packed snow in front of his position so the muzzle blast wouldn't kick up powder and reveal him. He reportedly kept snow in his mouth so his breath wouldn't steam in the cold air. The Soviet soldiers learned to fear that stretch of forest. Finnish propaganda gave him a nickname that stuck. The White Death. In roughly 100 days, Häyhä was credited with killing around 500 Soviet soldiers with his rifle. Some counts are higher if you include his submachine gun. Historians argue about the exact number, but even the conservative estimates put him at the top of every list of snipers ever recorded. The Soviets tried everything to get him. Counter snipers. Artillery barrages on the areas where they thought he was hiding. On March 6, 1940, they finally got him. A Soviet bullet hit him in the face, shattering his jaw. Fellow soldiers who found him said half his face was missing. He was carried off unconscious. He woke up a week later, on March 13, 1940. The day the war ended. He spent years recovering and needed multiple surgeries. But he lived. Finland's commander, Marshal Mannerheim, promoted him straight from corporal to second lieutenant. After the war, he went back to a quiet life. He hunted, bred dogs, and lived near the Russian border for the rest of his life. When asked late in life how he became such a good shot, he gave a one word answer. "Practice." When asked if he regretted the killing, he said he did what he was told to do, as well as he could. He died in 2002 at the age of 96.

November 7, 1944. In a Tokyo prison, the Japanese hang a man who was arguably the most important spy of the entire war, and they do it, pointedly, on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Richard Sorge had sent Stalin the intelligence that may have saved Moscow, and his reward, from the Soviet side, was to be disowned and abandoned, and from the Japanese, the noose. Sorge was a German, a committed communist, who worked as a journalist in Tokyo, a respected correspondent moving easily in German and Japanese official circles, trusted even by the German embassy. It was the perfect cover, because Sorge was in reality a Soviet spy, running one of the most successful intelligence networks in history, gathering secrets from the very heart of the German and Japanese establishments in Tokyo. He gave Moscow two pieces of intelligence of enormous importance. First, in the spring of 1941, he warned Stalin of the coming German invasion of the Soviet Union, giving a strikingly accurate picture of Operation Barbarossa, including its approximate timing. Stalin, in one of the great blunders of the war, refused to believe the warnings pouring in from Sorge and many other sources, and the invasion caught the Soviet Union disastrously unprepared. But it was Sorge's second great report that mattered most, and that connects directly to the story I just told you. As the Germans closed on Moscow in the autumn of 1941, the agonizing question for Stalin was whether Japan, Germany's ally, would also attack the Soviet Union, striking into the Soviet Far East. If it did, the Soviet divisions stationed in Siberia and the Far East to guard against Japan would have to stay there, and they could not be used to defend Moscow. Sorge, from inside the circles of power in Tokyo, learned the answer and sent it: Japan would not attack the Soviet Union. Japan had decided to strike south instead, against the United States and the British and Dutch empires, for the oil and resources of Southeast Asia, the decision that would lead to Pearl Harbor. That intelligence was gold. Reassured that his eastern frontier was safe, Stalin was able to transfer fresh, tough, well-equipped divisions from the Far East to the west, and those Siberian troops arrived at Moscow in time to stiffen the defense and to form the spearhead of the December counteroffensive that drove the Germans back from the capital. It is one of the strongest cases in the whole war for a single spy's intelligence changing the course of events. Sorge's report helped make possible the salvation of Moscow. His own end was grim. The Japanese secret police closed in on his network, and Sorge was arrested in Tokyo in the autumn of 1941, even as his greatest reports were doing their work. He was interrogated, held for years, and tried. And here is the bitter part: the Soviet Union, for which he had risked and given everything, disowned him. Stalin's government denied that Sorge was their agent, refused to acknowledge him or to try to exchange him, and left him to his fate, perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps out of Stalin's characteristic suspicion of his own most valuable people. Abandoned by the country he had served so brilliantly, Sorge was hanged by the Japanese on the 7th of November 1944, the Revolution's anniversary. Only long after the war, in the 1960s, did the Soviet Union finally acknowledge him and make him, posthumously, a Hero of the Soviet Union, putting his face on a postage stamp, the master spy belatedly claimed by the nation that had let him die. Richard Sorge is remembered now as perhaps the most consequential spy of the Second World War, the man in Tokyo whose secrets helped hold Moscow, hanged on this day, disowned by the very cause he had saved.