Max Otto von Stierlitz (Russian: Макс О́тто фон Шти́рлиц, IPA: [ˈʂtʲirlʲɪts]) is the lead character in a Russian book series written in the 1960s by Yulian Semyonov, and the television adaptation Seventeen Moments of Spring (starring Vyacheslav Tikhonov) as well as feature films (produced in the Soviet era) and a number of sequels and prequels. Other actors portrayed Stierlitz in several other films. Stierlitz has become a stereotypical spy in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, similar to James Bond in Western culture. American historian Erik Jens has described Stierlitz as the "most popular and venerable hero of Russian spy fiction".
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Character origins
The culture of Imperial Russia was very strongly influenced by that of France, and Russian writers accordingly shared the disdain traditionally held by French writers towards spy novels, which was seen as a lowbrow type of literature. In the Soviet Union, espionage was depicted before 1961 as something committed against the Soviet state by its enemies and not as an activity that the Soviet state itself engaged in. Perhaps the best example of this attitude was the founding of SMERSH in 1943, which was an acronym for the wartime slogan Smert' shpionam! ("Death to Spies!"), which reflected the picture promoted by the Soviet state of spies as a disreputable type of person who deserved to be killed without mercy. Furthermore, the legacy of the Yezhovshchina and other Stalinist repression had given the Chekisty, as secret policemen are always called in Russia, a very negative image. In November 1961, Vladimir Semichastny became chairman of the KGB and set out to improve the image of the Chekisty.
Semichastny wanted to erase the memory of the Yezhovshchina and give the KGB a more positive image. It was during his tenure as KGB chairman from 1961 to 1967 that the cult of the "hero spies" began in the Soviet Union, the Soviet media lionising the achievements of spies such as Harold "Kim" Philby, Richard Sorge, and Colonel Rudolf Abel. Inspired by the popularity of the James Bond novels in the West, Semichastny also encouraged Soviet writers to write novels featuring heroic Chekisty as their heroes. One such novel was No Password Required (1966) by Yulian Semyonov, set in the Russian Civil War, which marked the first appearance of the heroic Cheka agent Maxim Maximovich Isaуev. In 1967, Semichastny was replaced as KGB chairman by Yuri Andropov who likewise encouraged writers to publish novels featuring heroic Chekisty.
In January–February 1969, the novel Seventeen Moments of Spring by Semyonov, a sequel to No Password Required, was serialized in Pravda and published as a book later in 1969. The novel was set in Berlin in March-May 1945 as the Red Army advanced onto Berlin, causing the Nazis to become more desperate while Isayev, who has gone undercover in Berlin under the alias Max Otto von Stierlitz, outmaneuvers their plans. Impressed by the favorable public response to Seventeen Moments of Spring, Andropov pressed to have the book adopted as a television mini-series, which was filmed in 1971–72. Seventeen Moments of Spring was one of the most expensive Soviet television productions ever filmed, being shot on a lavish scale that was unusual for Soviet television. All of the leading parts were played by famous and well respected actors, which certainly contributed to its appeal. The mini-series caused much protest by the Red Army, who complained that the series gave the impression that it was the NKVD that won the Great Patriotic War, as the war with Germany is known in the Soviet Union. The director Tatyana Lioznova was subsequently ordered to add in new scenes showing the Red Army advancing and taking Berlin, which added another year to its production, causing the mini-series to debut in 1973 instead of 1972 as planned. To save money and give a sense of authenticity, the battle scenes Lioznova added were mostly stock footage from the war. The mini-series Seventeen Moments of Spring was another enormous hit in 1973, attracting an average of 30–40 million viewers per night and turning the Isayev character into a cultural phenomena in the Soviet Union.
Character
In Seventeen Moments of Spring, Stierlitz is the cover name for a Soviet super-spy Colonel Maxim Maximovich Isaуev (Макси́м Макси́мович Иса́ев), whose real name is Vsevolod Vladimirovich Vladimirov (Все́волод Влади́мирович Владимиров).
Stierlitz is assigned a role in the SS Reich Main Security Office in Berlin during World War II, infiltrating Ausland-SD (foreign intelligence) headed by Walter Schellenberg. Working deep undercover, Stierlitz tries to collect intelligence about the Germans' war plans and communicate it to Moscow. He receives instructions from Moscow on how to proceed, on one occasion traveling to Switzerland on a secret mission. He diverts the German nuclear "Vengeance Weapon" research program into a fruitless dead-end, thwarts separate peace talks between Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, engages in intellectual games with members of the Nazi high command and sacrifices his own happiness for the good of his motherland. Despite being racked with desire to return home to his wife, he subordinates his feelings to his duty, thus embodying an idealised Soviet vision of patriotism.
Stierlitz is quite the opposite of the action-oriented James Bond; most of the time he gains his knowledge without any Bond-style stunts and gadgets, while in the film adaptation of the stories the action is presented through a narrative voice-over by Yefim Kopelyan. He is presented in a deeply patriotic but non-ideological light, fighting to defend the Soviet motherland against external enemies rather than just defending the Communist government against its ideological opponents. Stierlitz engages in a lengthy "battle of the wits" with the Nazi leaders, especially his nemesis the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller who knows that there is a Soviet spy in Berlin and gradually closes in on Stierlitz. Much of the dramatic tension in both the book and the mini-series comes from the way that Müller, who is portrayed here as a relentless Javert-like figure, moves irrevocably towards the conclusion that Stierlitz is the mole, who in turn knows he can only delay the inevitable, but chooses to stay on as long as possible to sabotage the German war effort as much as he can. In what appeared to be a joke on the part of the mini-series's producers, the part of Müller was played by the Jewish actor Leonid Bronevoy. Unlike the real Müller, a very ambitious and rather crude career policeman whose only interest was power, Bronevoy portrayed Müller as having a certain suave charm whose conversations with Stierlitz, which however pleasant on the surface, were really attempts to probe who he really is.
Influences in Russian culture
Although Stierlitz was a much-loved character, he was also the butt of a common genre of Russian jokes, often satirising his deductive trains of thought, with unexpected twists, often turned absurd, delivered in the deadpan style of the voice-overs in the film adaptations. Many of them untranslatable due to puns. Aleksandra Arkhipova remarked that by her observations, there were 2.5 times more jokes about Stierlitz than about Leonid Brezhnev. Some examples:
Stieglitz sees 28 irons on the windowsill. "The safe house is no longer safe", he concludes.
Stierlitz approaches Berlin. The city is veiled in smoke from the fires. "Forgot to switch off the iron again," thinks Stierlitz with slight irritation.
Stieglitz received a radiogram from the headqurters: "Congrats birth son". A nostalgy swept over Stieglitz: he haven't been home for 20 years already.
After some time the cycle began its own life and many jokes had no relation to the movie altogether.
Stieglitz made a blind shot. The blind dropped dead.
Stieglitz had a thought. He liked it and had another thought.
Stierlitz continues to be a popular character in modern Russia. Despite the fact that references and Stierlitz jokes remain in contemporary speech, Seventeen Moments of Spring is very popular mainly because it is quite patriotic. It is repeated annually on Russian television, usually around Victory Day. Stierlitz also continues to have a political significance. When his actor Vyacheslav Tikhonov died in December 2009, the Foreign Intelligence Service—one of the successor organisations of the former Soviet KGB—sent its condolences to his family. Ivan Zassoursky notes that Russian Prime Minister (and former and current President) Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, has been portrayed as "embod[ying] the image—very important for the Russian television audience—of Standartenführer von Stierlitz... If anyone missed the connection between Putin, who served in Germany, and von Stierlitz, articles in the press reminded them of the resemblance and helped create the association." The connection went both ways; Putin was strongly influenced by the novels, commenting: "What amazed me most of all was how one man's effort could achieve what whole armies could not." Putin himself first came to public attention in 1991 when as an aide to Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of Leningrad (modern St. Petersburg), he performed for Soviet television an iconic scene from the television mini-series, making much of the fact that both he and Stierlitz were Chekisty.