Sándor Radó, géographe et agent de renseignement

Summary

Sándor Radó occupies one of the most honored places in the pantheon of Soviet agents of the Second World War, alongside Richard Sorge and Leopold Trepper. What made this Hungarian unique was that, while serving as an intelligence officer, he was also a distinguished and exceptionally inventive geographer. Guillaume Bourgeois traces the path that led him from communist activism to mastery of an academic discipline, and then from a geopolitical approach to cartography to the leadership of an intelligence network. He examines the unusual and precarious circumstances of Radó’s life in the Gulag before recounting his return to Budapest, where he became a powerful figure in the regime and the head of the post-Stalinist Hungarian school of geography. The vicissitudes of his fate encapsulate the history of the communist world while also shedding light on the conditions governing exchanges between East and West in the field of global cartography.