Written by Brigit McCone.
In August 1973, an estimated 80 million Soviet viewers were transfixed by the espionage drama of Seventeen Moments of Spring, emptying the streets during its broadcast. As a national hero, icy cool super-spy Stirlitz is rivaled only by James Bond. Like Bond, he originated in a series of novels, in his case by Yulian Semenov. However, where Bond’s spying represents a license to role-play, escaping everyday accountability, Stirlitz’s spying represents an emotionally draining and dehumanizing inauthenticity, reflecting everyday Soviet censorship culture. Unlike Bond, who sidesteps issues of inauthenticity on assignments by incompetently using his real name, Stirlitz’s “real” name (Maksim Maksimovich Isayev, which could be Jewish) is not even used by the show’s narration. Unlike Bond, who uses the dangers of his job as a pretext for casual flings with disposable women, Stirlitz holds himself longingly aloof from women to avoid endangering them. Unlike Bond, who is empowered by his “license to kill,” Stirlitz kills only once, and his victim is fully humanized. Finally, unlike Bond, Stirlitz’s cinematic image is the creation of a woman.
Official communist doctrines of gender equality meant that female directors like Tatyana Lukashevich and Tatiana Lioznova received more mainstream support than their Western counterparts. Seventeen Moments of Spring was a project of the Central Studio of Children and Youth Films, explaining the educational montages woven throughout, though Lioznova transcended her brief with a psychological depth that appealed to all ages (and genders). While Stirlitz could not be described as feminized, his emphasized sensitivity is a reaction against hypermasculine propagandist ideals, explaining his cult appeal.
Though women are marginalized in the show’s arena of Nazi high command, Lioznova never allows them to be forgotten. During an interrogation, the camera focuses on a female stenographer’s conflicted reaction. An educational montage pays tribute to the Red Army’s female soldiers, while another celebrates Edith Piaf and Paris, in defiance of Cold War oppositions. Pregnant, undercover radio operator Kate Rien, torn between duty and love, is celebrated for her “heroic emotions.” Her maternity raises the stakes, as in Lois Weber’s Suspense, but does not undermine her courage, resourcefulness, or political conviction. Though some feminists may be irritated by Lioznova’s use of Kate’s escalating maternity to define her heroism, she joins Fargo‘s Marge Gunderson as a rare screen depiction of a pregnant woman actively engaged in wider struggles. Stirlitz’s concern for supplying Kate with milk, his regular outings and chess games with the elderly and bereaved Frau Zaurich, and his care for a stray dog are incidental to the plot, but vital to his psychological health and heroic status. Lioznova suggests that a theoretical struggle on behalf of “the nation” is invalid without compassion for individuals, since “the nation is made up of people.”
In one of Lioznova’s trademark, lingering shots of wordless longing (see Three Poplars at Plyushchikha Street, a kind of Soviet Brief Encounter), Stirlitz’s Soviet superiors bring his wife to a Berlin bar, before he leaves for the Spanish Civil War. The two watch each other across the room, unable to risk contact. This flashback, which Lioznova insisted on over the objections of writer Semenov, is juxtaposed with the efforts of Gabi Nabel to become intimate with Stirlitz at the end of WWII. Initially assumed to be the sweetheart of one of Frau Zaurich’s dead sons, Gabi’s solidarity with Frau Zaurich is instead based on simple, Bechdel-friendly compassion, bonding after Gabi’s house was bombed. Gabi and Stirlitz share a lingering dance, but he gently rejects her, emphasizing the impossibility of intimacy in his position. Later, a sex-crazed female mathematician will drunkenly proposition Stirlitz, with a comical lack of success (though Stirlitz’s swearing “on [his] life” to return to her, while making his escape, is mistranslated as an out-of-character “may you drop dead”) before Stirlitz struggles to write home, unwilling to burden his estranged wife with declarations of love. Stirlitz’s desirability is embodied in this placing of women’s well-being before his own needs. Personal conflict dominates over political intrigue at the show’s poignant finale. Though Lioznova’s protagonist is masculine, his heroism is defined primarily through his empathetic relationship to the feminine, the elderly, and children.
Stirlitz’s allies are a librarian who prefers humanist Greeks to imperial Romans, and a pacifist pastor. These characters can be read as protesting Soviet authoritarianism as much as Nazism. In the words of writer Semenov: “the secret of Stirlitz’s longevity is explained not only by his charm and intelligence, but by the fact that I chose for him to remain outside the system after 1921, and to serve (while remaining patriotic) not the system as it is, but the ideal of struggle against fascism.” When the show’s fictional Stalin says of Nazi high command: “the closest associates of the tyrant, being on the brink of downfall, will betray him to save their lives,” he subtly indicates the paranoia that fueled his own purges of close associates. Through her spy’s deep cover, Lioznova largely sidesteps communist propaganda to focus on the conflict between Stirlitz’s humanist sympathies and pressure to compromise himself in the interests of the (Nazi) state.
Similarly, Mikhail Romm’s 1948 The Russian Question focuses on the conflict between censorship culture and individual conscience, in the dilemma of (American) journalist Harry Hill, who strives to tell the (positive) truth about the Soviet Union, when threatened with unemployment and persecution by his (American) superiors. Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1950 Conspiracy of the Doomed was the first Soviet film to acknowledge the widespread famines that followed collectivization, blaming the (American) government for causing them, as well as condemning the (American) secret service’s maneuverings to undermine the sovereignty of the USSR’s neighbors. In 1969, after Soviet invasion had crushed Alexander Dubcek’s attempt to establish democratic “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia, Moscow’s Taganka theatre staged Protect Your Faces, climaxing in Vladimir Vysotsky performing his individualist anthem “Wolf Hunt,” protesting (American) violence against the democratic leader (John F. Kennedy), while actors with mirrors showed audiences their own faces. The play was a sensation, and banned after three performances. In the sometimes patronizing Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, this phenomenon is defined as “social Freudianism,” an entire society’s projection of its suppressed self-image onto its enemies. Far from unconscious, however, “social Freudianism” exploits anti-capitalist and anti-fascist propaganda as permissible outlets for criticism, within a culture of “dancing with the censor” whose audience was adept at decoding subversive subtext.
This subtlety becomes immediately apparent when considering Seventeen Moments of Spring as anti-Nazi propaganda. Nazis feature in Western propaganda (a.k.a. pop culture) as evil caricatures and disposable cannon-fodder, but the Nazis of Seventeen Moments of Spring are intensely humanized and frequently sympathetic. As one of the film’s soulful Nazis puts it: “it’s easy to advise other people to be honest. But everyone personally tries to turn his dishonesty into honesty. To justify himself and his actions, so to speak.” Stirlitz’s Nazi counterpart, the mischievously machiavellian Walther Schellenberg, is introduced intimidatingly by his official report: “a true Aryan, of Nordic character, brave and firm… merciless towards the Reich’s enemies. An excellent family man… no discrediting liaisons.” When slavic, married Isayev (Stirlitz), is likewise defined as “a true Aryan, of Nordic character, self-possessed… Merciless towards the Reich’s enemies… Unmarried. No known discrediting liaisons,” we realize this information is unreliable. Gradually, as each of the film’s Nazis receives the banal description “a true Aryan, of Nordic character… merciless towards the Reich’s enemies,” it devolves into a deadpan joke at the expense of hollow official rhetoric. After the show’s broadcast, actor Oleg Tabakov received a letter from the real SS Commander Schellenberg’s niece, thanking him for bringing “Uncle Walther” to life with an apparently authentic performance.
Hitler’s henchmen are profiled in Stirlitz’s “information for pondering” with descriptions of their wives and families, followed by examples of their rhetoric dehumanizing enemies – Goering: “kill, kill and kill. Don’t think of the consequences,” Goebbels: “you should be cruel and merciless when it comes to those we’re fighting against,” Himmler: “we should be honest, decent and loyal only towards the representatives of our race.” Lioznova highlights Goering’s justification of an inhuman death camp as “what the nation wants,” implicitly contrasted with Pastor Schlagg’s definition of the nation as a collection of individuals. Schellenberg and Stirlitz will both reveal themselves shockingly desensitized, maintaining grim, gallows humor for the sake of their sanity. They muse together about their “true” personalities, discarded and stored for future use, like “coats in the wardrobe.” As Stirlitz catches himself thinking of Germany as “our country,” Seventeen Moments of Spring questions whether it is ever possible to play a role without becoming it. For Russian Jew Lioznova, who lost her family in the war, identifying with Germans and insistently humanizing Nazis is the ultimate rejection of their dehumanizing ideology, echoing Hannah Arendt’s philosophies.
The opening and closing images of the series are of Stirlitz, staring up at a formation of cranes. An iconic wartime song by Mark Bernes, “The Cranes Are Flying,” portrayed cranes as reincarnations of soldiers killed in battle. The Cranes Are Flying is also the title of the 1957 Palme d’Or winning masterpiece by Mikhail Kalatozov (I Am Cuba, Conspiracy of the Doomed), which explodes the romanticized mystique of anthems such as “Wait For Me” in its unflinching portrait of the brutal realities of wartime, centering the female experience of abandonment. Through his meditations on flying cranes, Stirlitz thus indicates his consciousness of the burden of his country’s sacrifices. Churchill, as Seventeen Moments of Spring reminds us, once telegramed that “future generations will recognize their debt to the Red Army as unconditionally as we… who were the witnesses of those great victories,” but it is now rarely emphasized in Western histories that 75 percent of Nazi casualties were inflicted on the Eastern front, along with an estimated 20 million Soviet deaths.
While triumphalist American images of WWII reflect their successful foreign war, the Soviet experience was national trauma, barely concealed by its rebranding as “Great Patriotic War.” Scars are markers of villainy in the creepily eugenic Bond franchise, but Lioznova lingers on scarred bystanders and the rubble of bombardment as testament to war’s destruction. The “always careful” Stirlitz’s iconic masculinity lies not in swaggering machismo, but in his willingness to admit the futility and insignificance of his role, his personal courage in the face of totalitarianism, and his compassion for suffering. Compare Vladimir Vysotsky, as the leading postwar icon of Soviet masculinity, in his open acknowledgement of the trauma of Stalinist purges, and of WWII’s devastation:
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From the ticking clock of 24 to Bond’s grittier, morally conflicted reboots, the influence of Seventeen Moments of Spring can be seen throughout pop culture, but its emotional depth is unrivaled. By making audiences fear for the fate of every informer, and sympathize with the sacrificed humanity of every oppressor, Tatiana Lioznova arguably created the most profound spy story ever filmed. Depicting a complex world, where integrity is a compromise between loyalty and necessity, and how we behave defines who we become, Seventeen Moments of Spring is James Bond for grown-ups.
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Brigit McCone studied for a year in Moscow State University, writes and directs short films and radio dramas and is the author of The Erotic Adventures of Vivica (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and rampant Russophilia.