Short answers, pulled from the story.
Richard Gustavovich Sorge was born on the 4th of October 1895 in the settlement of Sabunchi, a suburb of Baku. His father worked as a German mining engineer for the Deutsche Petroleum-Aktiengesellschaft and the Caucasian oil company Branobel.
In May 1933 the GRU decided to have Richard Sorge organize an intelligence network in Japan under the codename Ramsay. He arrived in Yokohama on the 6th of September 1933 as the Japan correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung to serve as cover for his espionage activities.
On the 20th of June 1941 Richard Sorge reported that war between Germany and the USSR was inevitable with a German attack commencing in the latter part of June. He stated that the expected start of the German-Soviet war would be around June 15 based on information from Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin Scholl.
Richard Sorge was arrested on the 18th of October 1941 in Tokyo and confessed under torture but the Soviet Union denied he was a Soviet agent. The Soviet Union declined all attempts by the Japanese to trade him for one of their own spies while his wife Katya Maximova died in the Gulag in 1943.
The Soviet government awarded Richard Sorge the title Hero of the Soviet Union in November 1964, twenty years after his death. Initially his reputation in West Germany in the 1950s was highly negative before publisher Rudolf Augstein wrote articles presenting him positively in summer 1953.