CHAPTER FIVE

“SPIRITUAL COAUTHORSHIP”

Seventeen Moments of Spring and the Soviet TV Miniseries

Growing frustration with the failure of domestic news programs to create compelling portraits of model people led television enthusiasts, like their predecessors in film and literature of the early 1930s, to turn away from documentary and toward fiction. This turn coincided with the rise, beginning in the second half of the 1960s, of a new television genre: the fictional miniseries. Like other Soviet fiction art forms—the novel, film, theater—that had long sought to portray the nature of Soviet people and reality, the fiction miniseries offered far more artistic resources than a brief segment on Time for portraying the Soviet person in a complex postwar world. Produced in Soviet film studios by experienced directors and actors, the television miniseries could develop fictional characters in depth, drawing heavily on Soviet film and literature, where acknowledging moral complexity in Soviet life had been the norm since Stalin’s death. By the early 1970s, critics and Central Television staff had begun to argue that the fiction television miniseries might displace news as the chief genre for addressing the related aesthetic and political problems of documentary television: the apparent failure of the television camera’s X-ray vision to instantaneously and effortlessly convey Soviet superiority in a morally complex international landscape.

These conversations centered on the most iconic Soviet television miniseries of all time, Tatiana Lioznova’s twelve-episode, nearly fourteen-hour Seventeen Moments of Spring (Gorky Studio for Children’s and Youth Films, 1973).1 As critics observed, the intertwined problems of moral complexity and the camera’s inability to convey hidden inner states were among the main themes of Seventeen Moments. Based on a spy novel by the popular and politically connected author Iulian Semenov, the film tells the story of a Soviet spy, Maksim Isaev (played by the ’60s intelligentsia heartthrob Viacheslav Tikhonov), who is embedded in the top leadership of Nazi Germany as a Standartenführer in the SS named Otto von Stirlitz. The plot traces Stirlitz’s efforts, between February and March 1945, to stop secret talks between Heinrich Himmler’s representatives and the United States seeking to conclude a separate peace behind the backs of the Americans’ Soviet allies.² In addition to a thrilling spy story and a handsome lead actor, however, Seventeen Moments of Spring also offered a new account of television’s power to help viewers see the true nature of Soviet people and their society, one that emphasized the enormous difficulty of achieving this kind of vision, and the ability of long, serial fiction forms to train viewers to do it.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, television critics and journalists engaged in extensive public discussions about the television miniseries in general and about Seventeen Moments specifically, reimagining the genre as something closely related to Soviet documentary and news programs and quite distinct from capitalist television’s proliferation of ostensibly addictive serial forms. These genuinely Soviet, beneficial serial films, the argument went, would create active viewers, able to take up the high-stakes task shared by Soviet news and fiction television alike: recognizing the hidden, largely invisible moral superiority of Soviet heroes.³ Seventeen Moments, critics at the time argued, engaged viewers in an arduous process of ethical evaluation in a morally complex historical and international landscape—what one critic called “spiritual coauthorship.”⁴ Lioznova’s film insisted that this task would be extraordinarily difficult, but surmountable if viewers learned both how to see and when to trust. Should viewers agree to cooperate in this way, the film offered what was effectively a new deal between the state and the educated public, providing a new, post-Thaw foundation for Soviet political life.5 Like the Czechoslovakian serials by Jaroslav Dietl that Paulina Bren has described, Seventeen Moments engaged viewers in a collaborative project that aimed to reforge the relationship between state authority and the public after 1968. However, Seventeen Moments of Spring offered a quite different bargain than the normalizing, privatizing one Bren finds reflected in Czechoslovakian serials of the 1970s. Rather than emphasizing private relationships, Seventeen Moments proposed to viewers a new entente between state and citizens based on the acceptance of police authority in public life and the embrace of an imperial identity for the Soviet Union.⁶

This is, of course, only one possible reading of Seventeen Moments of Spring, albeit one supported by evidence from the film itself and also by the arguments of critics and the film’s producers in the internal conversations that preceded its release and the press coverage that followed. The triumph of Seventeen Moments, Stephen Lovell has written, was its ability to be many things to many viewers—for some a patriotic tale about war heroism, for others a fantasy about the mobility and luxury consumer goods of Western life. And there were some for whom the film offered an Aesopian parable about Soviet life, since, as many at the time (and subsequently) noticed, the offices and hallways where Stirlitz worked resembled life in the late Soviet bureaucracy much more than life in Nazi Berlin, 1945.⁷ For still others, the series’ political and historical setting was merely the frame for moral and personal struggles that were universal and human, rather than political.⁸

Nonetheless, the significance of Seventeen Moments of Spring was and is much greater than the sum of the many separate, diverse audience responses.⁹ As perhaps the single most iconic cultural product of the Brezhnev era, Seventeen Moments is most interesting as a shared experience, one that was discussed and debated at great length in public and semipublic settings, from the pages of Pravda to apartment kitchens. It was something to talk about, and frequently to laugh about, to dissect and question, in public and among friends. I try here to trace those themes that emerge from both the film and the conversations it generated, and that connect the film to the linked aesthetic and political problems that preoccupied Central Television’s staff and leadership in the 1970s.

The Soviet TV Miniseries in Its International Context

Seventeen Moments of Spring was only the most prominent of a diverse set of television miniseries broadcast by Central Television beginning in the second half of the 1960s. This proliferation of miniseries on Central Television was part of a broader flourishing of serial fiction genres among Eastern European socialist state television services, as Paulina Bren, Anikó Imre, Sabina Mihelj, and others have demonstrated.10 In the wake of the crushing of reform movements in the late 1960s, state socialist television systems turned, like their Western counterparts, to a politicized private sphere, where political ideas were expressed within the bounds of various nuclear and ersatz workplace families, often led by women.¹¹ But on Soviet Central Television, ambivalence about the serial form remained strong. For the first socialist revolutionary state, the embattled leader of the socialist world, a “normalization” based on the privatization of politics was not an acceptable solution. Serial fiction television was, after all, the genre that most powerfully evoked the specter of Western mass culture, that “special pseudoculture, designed to bamboozle the masses, to dull their social consciousness,” as Leonid Brezhnev put it in 1969.¹² As one Soviet scholar of capitalist world television noted, the majority of U.S. television programming consisted of serial formats, cheap to produce and enormously popular with viewers and advertisers alike, that were the “fulfillment” and the “chief vehicle” of mass culture.¹³ They were especially suited, in other words, for the production of “the mass bourgeois man, who lacks internal criteria in his reasoning, who borrows “his” thoughts from radio and television programs and ads, and whose personality [lichnost’] is atrophied, reduced.”¹⁴ The production and enormous popular success of Seventeen Moments was thus preceded and accompanied by a long and incomplete process whereby the television miniseries was made artistically and ideologically acceptable to Soviet cultural authorities.

Given this understanding of the television serial format, why did Central Television adopt serials at all? One chief reason may have been the predominance of serials in the global exchange of television programs, both within the socialist bloc and with the capitalist world. In June 1964, six months before the broadcast of the first Central Television serial film (Drawing Fire onto Ourselves [Vyzyvaem ogon’ na sebia], directed by Sergei Kolosov), one member of the State Committee for Television and Radio, Nikolai Sakontikov, told Central Television Party activists about his recent trip to Japan. “I had discussions with various companies in Japan that could buy our television programs,” he told the group. “All these various organizations said the same thing—if you have thirteen-episode series we will buy them right away. The miniseries in thirteen episodes has become the law of the international market,” he continued. “If we want to join the international market, we need serial formats in our musical and other programs.”15 As Sudha Rajagopalan has shown in the case of feature films, Soviet cultural producers were often quite willing to compromise their espoused principles at home if it meant gaining access to foreign markets.¹⁶ Given the constraints of transnational program exchanges, Soviet television may have been willing to embrace serials in order to reach audiences across the socialist bloc and beyond.¹⁷

Central Television executives and producers also quickly noticed the popularity—and thus potential influence—of miniseries with domestic audiences. Drawing Fire onto Ourselves evoked an outpouring of almost twelve hundred letters in the days following its broadcast.¹⁸ The film, which tells the story of Soviet resistance fighters during the Second World War who collaborate with Polish prisoners to destroy Nazi aircraft, generated emotional and patriotic responses.¹⁹ A schoolgirl, Liuda Gordeeva, wrote that she could not “believe that Anya, Yan, and Kostia died. I am not ashamed,” she wrote, “of the tears that covered the film’s final frames in a hazy veil. No! They live, they will always be beside us, and I feel responsibility for my every step, for my entire life.”²⁰ A veteran declared the film “the next triumph after Chapaev,” the celebrated 1934 film set during the Civil War. These emotional responses stressed the centrality of historical memory in shaping loyal norms and beliefs in the present, and emphasized the continuity between past and present political battles. “We, young mothers,” wrote an employee of the city hospital in Lipetsk after the broadcast of Drawing Fire, “will remain anxious about the fate of our children while undefeated fascists still walk the earth . . . the film instilled pride in our victorious people and contempt for the enemies of mankind.”²¹

These emotional, patriotic reactions were desirable in themselves, but the TV series, ordered by Central Television from Soviet film studios, also offered a solution to the problem of obtaining films for TV broadcast. In the early 1960s, as Kristin Roth-Ey has shown, Central Television lacked the cultural status and political and economic clout to broadcast feature films.22 In the month of Drawing Fire’s broadcast, Central Television was still receiving complaints from viewers about the absence of feature films in its lineup. As one viewer put it in February 1965, “films on television are a rare event, one could say a luxury, and if there are any, then it’s the same ones over and over. Obviously,” he continued, “the people who make the television schedule don’t worry themselves about whether the schedule is interesting. Clearly, reports or summaries of achievements are easier to produce.”²³ As Central Television’s audience and budgets grew, it was still largely unable to command recent feature films from the studios, but it could order the production of new, made-for-TV movies.

Yet the growing acceptance of fiction serials as a popular, influential, and internationally marketable genre in the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s took place alongside significant resistance to serials among Soviet cultural authorities in the Party leadership and in the press. Substantial anxiety surrounded domestic-themed serials, including those being produced in great numbers elsewhere in Eastern Europe. While Soviet television serials did include a number of popular apartment-block miniseries, not unlike the socialist soap operas made elsewhere in the Eastern European nations, ambivalence about the genre was stronger inside Central Television.²⁴ The Central Television representative who attended a 1976 festival of Czechoslovakian television serial films reported that the serials he saw were “not of interest” for Central Television. The most frequent subjects for these television series were “the problems of the young family and the relationship between generations within the family”—important topics for Soviet propaganda as well. “But, unfortunately,” he continued, “family was shown in isolation from social life, from the productive work of the people, as if the walls of the home were the outer limits of the characters’ contacts and interests.” The show’s conflicts revolved around questions of standard of living, “a private car, an apartment,” and so on. Despite the fact that the actors were talented, he concluded, “this limited sphere of interests deprives the film’s heroes of their individuality, makes them indistinguishable from one another.”²⁵ These flaws, the representative concluded, made these films unsuitable for acquisition by Central Television. Additional evidence for the relative underrepresentation of both open-ended serials and serials focusing on domestic, everyday topics on Central Television were the occasional calls, in professional journals, for such soap-like, long-running family serials on Central Television. One writer suggested that Central Television create serials modeled on similar shows elsewhere in the socialist bloc and even in the Soviet Baltic republics, where local television stations were allowed greater scope for experimentation because of the reception of foreign radio and television signals in border areas.26

Alongside a handful of domestic serials, Central Television’s serials of the 1960s and ’70s focused on public, often historical topics, such as the Civil War or Great Patriotic War, and the work of the police and the KGB. These historical, military, and espionage films made up the genre most often known as the detektiv (although the protagonist might be an intelligence agent or wartime partisan rather than a detective) or, somewhat less often, the “adventure film [prikliuchencheskii fil’m].”²⁷ These serials were predominantly structured as miniseries, divided into a finite set of episodes with a clear end point, rather than open-ended serial forms, like soap opera or situation comedy. Their finite duration and focus on particular, often historical episodes sought to strengthen the sharp distinction between the engrossing miniseries and the real time and routines of everyday life. Meant to break routines, rather than entrench them, Central Television’s serials were even broadcast in a festive, disruptive way: rather than releasing a new episode once a week, Central Television broadcast an episode every evening, requiring, paradoxically, much greater commitment from viewers, who simply had to clear their evening schedules for two weeks at a stretch in order to avoid missing an episode. They were also frequently aired during Central Television’s multiweek festive periods close to major holiday dates.²⁸

Yet the uniqueness of Soviet television serials relative to their Eastern and Western European counterparts should not be overstated. Soviet TV movies like Seventeen Moments of Spring were part of the broader, 1970s golden age of the TV movie, which addressed serious political and social topics via a fictionalized story. By the mid-1960s, facing resistance from Hollywood to television’s demands for the best new feature films, the American networks began filming their own feature-length movies, many of which were devoted to the most serious social issues.29 Some of these movies became “media events” and sparked serious discussions in the press in much the same way as Seventeen Moments of Spring and other highly publicized Soviet TV serial films.³⁰ If American TV films (and, as Paulina Bren has shown, their Czechoslovakian counterparts) avoided direct political discussion by shifting political life to the private sphere, Seventeen Moments removed contemporary political problems abroad and back in time—to Nazi Berlin in the spring of 1945. At the same time, despite the film’s obvious engagement with public masculinity, Stirlitz’s actions are also partly driven by personal concerns for a kind of alternative family—primarily his radio operator Kathe/Katia and her baby.

Regardless of how we assess the exceptionalism of Soviet television serials, their proponents saw the distinction between Soviet, socialist serials and their capitalist counterparts as an essential feature of their defense of the genre. The expansion of Soviet television serial production was thus accompanied by a vigorous effort, in the press and in scholarly books and journals, to defend and reinterpret Soviet television seriality as a public, masculine cultural form, one that could successfully undertake the tasks set for more “serious” television genres, such as news and documentary film. The distinction hinged not simply on the different intentions underlying socialist cultural production, although those were generally mentioned too, but on entirely renarrating the artistic origins of the genre, as a continuation, albeit with revisions, of the documentary experimentation of the early Central Television enthusiasts. Here, journalists and television critics saw serial films as further developing the artistic goals and principles of early television, exemplified by Vladimir Sappak’s writings, while moving beyond what was seen, by the end of the 1960s, as Sappak’s excessive optimism. What was needed, as the journalist and critic Vladimir Derevitskii argued in a 1970 article, was a turn away from Sappak’s unmediated encounters between person and everyday reality [povsednevnost’iu] and toward actors and artifice as the best way to reveal ideological truth. “For a variety of reasons,” Derevitskii explained, “the direction that Sappak advocated so [strongly] has not been widely adapted on our television, although to some extent it is present in [the Lithuanian family-themed serial] The Petraitisov Family. But overall,” the Lithuanian serial “approaches the artistic and journalistic understanding of reality from the opposite side: via the encounter of the actor and everyday reality.”31

The redefinition of television’s artistic strengths away from unmediated reality and live broadcasting and toward actors, artifice, and serial forms continued unabated in the 1970s, as television serials began to receive more serious critical consideration, particularly in the wake of the broadcast of Seventeen Moments of Spring. In 1974, a conference on serial television film was held in Tallinn, organized by the Artistic Problems of Mass Communications Media sector of the Ministry of Culture’s Institute of History.³² There, the critic Yuri Bogomolov argued that serials represented the return of Vladimir Sappak’s “effect of immediacy” [effekt siiuminutnosti], moving viewers by bringing them into live contact with events (although without either liveness or actual events).³³ The nature of this interaction between viewers and events on screen was likewise changed. Rejecting Sappak’s vision of instantaneous revelation, critics described a much lengthier and more laborious process. As Valentin Mikhalkovich argued, the television serial created active viewers by immersing them in historical narratives that were presented as incomplete, forcing the viewer to overcome the excess of detail and put together a meaningful narrative him or herself.³⁴

Seventeen Moments as a Political Film

The initial critical reception of Seventeen Moments of Spring suggested that cultural elites recognized the miniseries as an enormously successful example of a serious, significant television serial, nourished by its social context, embodying popular ethical values, and, most importantly, engaging viewers actively in politicized interpretive work or “spiritual coauthorship.”³⁵ Seventeen Moments of Spring’s first audience was the artistic council [khudsovet] of the Gorky Central Film Studio for Children’s and Youth Films, which viewed and discussed the film’s episodes in three sessions during the months before they were broadcast on Central Television in August 1973.³⁶ In the discussions that followed those screening sessions, speakers described the film in precisely these terms—not solely as popular entertainment, but as a “genuine political film,” a genre that was being promoted “from above.”³⁷ Seventeen Moments was based on a spy novel, but many members of the khudsovet were quick to describe the film as something more than a detektiv. “It’s either a psychological detektiv, or a political detektiv, or maybe not a detektiv at all,” the director Veniamin Dorman commented. “Probably,” he continued, “it is an account of that time [rasskaz o vremeni] done seriously and in depth.”38

Describing Seventeen Moments of Spring, the Gorky Studio’s artistic council borrowed the clichés used to describe Time and other documentary television programs. Echoing ambitious television journalists justifying their own roles on screen, the cinematographer Igor Klebanov praised the way that the film presented Stirlitz as an unusually talented, rational individual. “In every frame where our hero appears,” he noted, “we see a sharp, analytical mind. That is the [film’s] main victory.” Klebanov saw Stirlitz’s value as a subject for the camera’s gaze not only in his “devotion and loyalty to the Motherland”—that was “only the foundation.” Most important was the fact that Moscow had “sent this interesting, talented person, who was capable of carrying out the important task set for him by our political leaders.”³⁹ The studio members were not the only ones to notice this connection between a film like Seventeen Moments and the formal features and objectives of documentary, political television programming: the scholar Anri Vartanov, writing in 1976, compared Seventeen Moments to Central Television documentary programs like With All My Heart [Ot vsei dushi], and the miniseries’ very prominent narrator, voiced by Efim Kopelian, to a news reporter or commentator.⁴⁰

Yet those features of the series that made it a “political film” and a “history of a soul” created the same problems as they did on Soviet television news: they slowed the film’s pace and risked boring viewers. As many critics have noted at the time and since, Seventeen Moments was astonishingly slow and ponderous, much more so than the novel it was based on.⁴¹ Some of those present at the Gorky Studio council meetings defended this deliberate pacing. Too often, Dorman argued, spy films had “chased after what we call tempo,” leading to a loss of “details, some nuances of character.”⁴² Another studio representative allowed that in the first episodes “there had been too much slowness, too many lingering looks at details. But considering that there are so many episodes ahead and dynamism is developing,” she continued, “this is appropriate.”⁴³ Others, however, worried that the film’s lengthy shots of the protagonist were often “a bit long” and could be “briefer.” The hero’s inner world—the central focus of the film—was sometimes “monotonous” and “like cardboard” [kartonen].44 Many shared the concern that the significance of Stirlitz’s looks and actions might not be clear to viewers. “I’m not against the fact that the film is slow,” commented the film critic and editor Alla Gerber; “it needs to be shown how [Stirlitz] stands up, how he starts walking. The viewer will pay attention to that if it conveys some kind of information about his [inner] state. But here,” she objected, “he just stands up, starts to walk.”⁴⁵ Action itself was in short supply in the film—despite its ostensible focus on particularly significant “moments” in an extraordinary time, the film consists mainly of conversations, people pouring drinks, smoking, getting in and out of cars, feeding the fish, and taking naps. As the director Mark Donskoi put it, “what does Stirlitz do? He kills a provocateur at one point, and otherwise he just thinks. He paces for a while, slowly takes a glass, fills it. They show us his thoughts in close-up.”⁴⁶ “I didn’t care about this person’s fate,” the director Il’ia Frez told the group—“I wanted something to happen.”⁴⁷ Moreover, rather like Time’s news items that seemed to bear no clear relationship to the particular day or even year in which they were broadcast, the “moments” in Seventeen Moments of Spring—the film’s periodic interruption by a ticking clock sound and a black screen giving a very specific date and time, often without a clear connection to the action that followed—seemed entirely random.⁴⁸ “This isn’t moments,” Frez argued, “but a most detailed story with an entirely different rhythm.”⁴⁹ A. Z. Afinogenov complained that he couldn’t figure out which were the promised “moments,” and, moreover, “it was not interesting trying to follow them.”

As with news programming, however, assertions about how viewers would react were based solely on individual critical opinion; there was simply no way to predict whether viewers would be engaged, and opinions varied widely on that score. Ultimately, the Gorky Studio council members could only rely on their own tastes as predictors of viewer response. One member of the council described the long “psychological duels” between Stirlitz and the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller, as better than anything she had seen “even in the films the Americans make so masterfully.”⁵⁰ The children’s author and critic Mark Bremener, however, disagreed, comparing Stirlitz unfavorably to other mediators and tricksters drawn from Soviet literature.51 “I am reminded,” he said, “of how Babel described [the legendary Odessan Jewish gangster] Benia Krik. Benia speaks rarely, but deliciously [smachno], when he is quiet, you wish he would say a little more. Here,” Bremener continued, describing the dialogue between Stirlitz and Müller, “when they are quiet, you do not want them to say anything more.”⁵² Despite these disagreements and criticisms for Lioznova, however, by the second and third post-screening sessions the majority of those present emphasized Seventeen Moments’ significance as a “political film,” a piece of “serious social research” built upon “many experiments.”⁵³

Moral Ambiguity and Visual Collaboration in Seventeen Moments of Spring

Interpretive ambiguity regarding the miniseries’ likely reception did not, however, stop the Gorky Studio artistic council members and other critics from highlighting and praising the film’s approach to viewers. Central to Seventeen Moments’ success as a “political film,” many critics argued, was the assumptions the film made about the viewers’ ability to make their own judgments in a morally complex and deceptive landscape. Summarizing this viewpoint in the Gorky Studio meetings, Alla Gerber praised the film’s authors for having refrained from directing viewers explicitly, and described the film as “very democratic,” a “laboratory” into which all viewers were permitted to go, and “where far from every question is answered.”⁵⁴ For Anri Vartanov, Seventeen Moments’ success in this regard made it the fulfillment of early dreams about television’s powers to immerse viewers in an experience of immediacy and unpredictability. “We follow the film’s events like eyewitnesses,” Vartanov wrote, “as if we don’t yet know the outcome. A miracle, completely televisual in essence, takes place during the film.” “Every viewer,” Vartanov continued, over the course of the film and “without any suggestion from the authors, passes his own ruthless sentence on the enemies.”⁵⁵ Central to Seventeen Moments’ value as a political film, therefore, was its engagement of viewers in a collaborative process of moral investigation and judgment.

The film presents this process, however, as lengthy, laborious, and even dangerous, rather than instantaneous or miraculous—an act of collaboration, with attendant ethical and personal risks. All this is made apparent in a strange, three-way scene in the film’s fourth episode, which offers the film’s most explicit instructions to the viewer. The scene takes place between Stirlitz and his reluctant agent, a pacifist Catholic priest named Pastor Schlag (Rostislav Platt). Stirlitz is interrogating Schlag, who has been in jail for antigovernment activities, in order to obtain his release and recruit him as an agent. A third character, a Gestapo officer, Eismann (Leonid Kuravlev), listens in; Eismann is investigating Stirlitz because of Stirlitz’s involvement in a series of operations that, as his superiors have noticed, were strangely unsuccessful, including the repression of a scientist who might otherwise have helped Germany develop the atom bomb. This setup and these three characters reflect the film’s extreme moral complexity. Eismann, a loyal Nazi officer whose evil ought to be self-evident, is presented in an earlier scene as a loyal comrade, who bravely risks his own career by writing a report vouching for Stirlitz because he “cannot believe that Stirlitz could be dishonest.” The ostensible protagonist, Stirlitz, by contrast, appears here in the role of aggressive Nazi police interrogator. The pastor, usually presented as an admirable, though flawed, character, behaves cagily under interrogation.

The scene begins with Eismann requesting a recording of Stirlitz’s past interrogation of Schlag. We see him begin listening, and then the action cuts, in a flashback, to the interrogation itself. The camera continually cuts back to Eismann listening, linking the viewer’s appraisal of Schlag and Stirlitz to Eismann’s act of surveillance, which shares, after all, the objective of uncovering Stirlitz’s inner nature. After working Schlag over in a seemingly conventional way—subtly threatening him with a return to jail, assuring him that he wants to have good relations with him on a “purely human level”—Stirlitz asks Schlag to perform a particular job for him in exchange for his release from prison.

That job, however, is quite vague. Stirlitz tells Schlag that he has friends, “men of science, party functionaries, journalists, military men” who are not members of the opposition; indeed, they are “fanatically devoted to the regime.” Stirlitz does not want Schlag to entrap and denounce them. He assures Schlag that he has many other informants, and he does not need Shchlag to report on his conversations with these people. On the contrary, he suggests that Schlag speak with them only in “the forest [or] the hall,” where they cannot be recorded. Instead, what he wants from Schlag is something seemingly innocuous—Schlag’s “opinion about what level of evil, or what measure of good, you observe in these people.” These lines—delivered almost four and a half hours into a film whose action consists primarily of conversations in the forest and the hallway, between party functionaries, military men, and assorted members of the scientific and cultural elite, all ostensibly “fanatically devoted” to the Nazi regime—may as well be directly addressed to the viewer, whose representatives on screen are now not only Eismann, listening in, but also Pastor Schlag, the reluctant collaborator.

Stirlitz’s assignment for Schlag in fact bears a striking resemblance to the work that viewers were expected to do, that is, assess the inner qualities of a group of complex characters and deliver a judgment. Schlag, however, requires further persuasion before he agrees to take on this task. He responds to Stirlitz’s proposal not by agreeing or refusing to participate, but by offering two interpretations of Stirlitz’s motives. “Either you trust me too much,” he says, “and are asking for my support for something for which you cannot ask anyone else’s support, or you are deceiving me [vy menia provotsiruite].” And, he continues, “if you are deceiving me, then our conversation is going in circles—you remain a functionary [funktsioner] and I remain a person who chooses the hard path in order to avoid becoming a functionary.” At stake, therefore, is whether Schlag can trust and work with someone in a position of state authority. Schlag’s interpretation of Stirlitz’s nebulous assignment leaves two principles unchallenged, however—first, that this work of telling good from evil is very important, and second, that it requires enormous trust to be established between them. Stirlitz responds: “What would convince you that I am not deceiving you?” And Schlag answers: “Look me in the eye.” Stirlitz, who has indeed been avoiding Schlag’s gaze, turns and looks at him (figure 12). Strikingly, despite the large amount of time the film devotes to close-ups of Stirlitz’s face, the camera shows not Stirlitz’s face but Schlag’s, reacting to Stirlitz’s gaze—it is Schlag’s inner thoughts, his acceptance of this deal, that are important. The experience of exchanging this revealing look causes both men to smile mysterious, knowing smiles, registering the mutual receipt of information that cannot be conveyed with words. Stirlitz then stands and says, “We will consider that we have exchanged verifying certificates [my obmenialis’ veritel’nymi gramotami] and our agreement is almost finalized” (figure 13).

FIGURE 12. Stirlitz and Schlag gaze at each other in Seventeen Moments of Spring

What exactly has transpired here? First, a “functionary” has persuaded a dissenting intellectual (Schlag is linked in the film with the word inakomyslie— “other-thinking” or nonconformism) to trust and cooperate with him. The basis of that trust is not verbal assurances but visual interaction, the exchange of penetrating gazes. This foundation of visual interaction and mutual evaluation is also the task that Stirlitz convinces Schlag to accept: the careful assessment of the good and bad moral qualities of individual members of the Nazi elite. If we understand Stirlitz’s assignment to Schlag as being primarily addressed to the television audience, to watch the film is to agree to become a collaborator on Stirlitz’s terms—to become involved in a nuanced moral investigation of people whom one ought to automatically find morally repulsive. Television technology facilitates the audience’s collaboration in the film’s project by making the film’s characters visible and available for their inspection.

FIGURE 13. Smiles following the exchange of visual “certifi cates”

At the same time, however, Lioznova seems to question the reliability of seeing as a way of knowing. Early in the film, Walter Schellenberg (Oleg Tabakov) screens the latest foreign newsreel for Himmler (Nikolai Prokopovich). When Stalin appears, Himmler remarks that Stalin looks older; Schellenberg demurs; Himmler insists. The disagreement is not resolved—the question of whether or not Stalin has aged remains without an objective answer, despite the presentation of his image on screen. The film’s presentation of “information for reflection” about each major character—another feature of the film that made viewers into investigators—likewise raised the question of whether the camera could expose a person’s inner qualities reliably. In a profile of Martin Bormann, an extreme close-up of Bormann’s eyes cannot stand alone—it is accompanied by the presentation of historical evidence, including damning quotations read by Kopelian and newsreel footage of Nazi atrocities. Lioznova even inserts a minor joke about the efficacy of “certifying gazes” like those exchanged by Schlag and Stirlitz. Later in the film, Stirlitz awaits Bormann in one of his favorite conspiratorial hangouts, the natural history museum. In a shot that echoes his earlier shared gaze with Schlag, Stirlitz exchanges a penetrating look with a stuffed chimpanzee (figure 14).

Regardless of the troubling unreliability of visual evidence, Lioznova presents the stakes of Stirlitz’s task for Schlag—the assessment of individuals’ inner natures—as extremely high. In the fifth episode, Runge, a nuclear physicist, is being beaten by a Nazi officer; another officer, whom we have seen listening in on the interrogation from another room, rushes in and stops him, explaining to Runge that “you have to understand, yesterday in the bomb attacks he lost his wife and two children.” Runge, one of the film’s several intelligentsia characters who suffer from intertwined physical and moral weakness, falls for this classic good cop, bad cop routine, and exposes Stirlitz as the person who authorized his release to the prison hospital under false pretenses. Seventeen Moments thus presents the process of moral investigation of its characters as both extremely difficult and terribly important.

FIGURE 14. Stirlitz gazes at a stuffed chimpanzee

Whether or not most viewers felt themselves to be collaborating as they entered the film’s morally ambiguous universe, popular and critical responses to the film revolved around the same questions the film posed: how much good or evil was there in these ostensible enemies? Many viewers puzzled over the film’s charming and attractive Nazis, played by beloved Soviet stage and screen actors associated with 1960s intelligentnost’.56 Some viewers responded enthusiastically to the idea that Nazi leaders were people too, since this conveyed the full strength of the enemy and thus the full heroism of Soviet spies and soldiers.⁵⁷ As the director Il’ia Gurin put it in the Gorky Studio meeting, “I really liked Himmler. We’ve seen so many films in which all the work of our counterintelligence looks laughable, because the enemies always turned out to be fools.” Moreover, a fuller presentation of enemy personalities was psychologically interesting. “Here,” Gurin continued, “you observe with interest—what is going on in the souls of these people? You see that they are also people, worthy foes, an environment in which it is very hard for the hero to work.” Others were far less comfortable with the film’s portrayal of Nazi criminals as likeable. Central Television received many letters protesting the positive presentation of Nazi characters, and particularly the decision to cast popular actors in these roles.⁵⁸ Another member of the artistic council commented: “There is something in them [the Nazi characters] that forces you to sympathize with them, even though that should not happen, because they are cursed fascists. . . . But after watching,” he continued, “I had the feeling that I was starting to sympathize with one or the other of them in their little intrigues.”⁵⁹

For many other viewers and critics, however, the film’s engaging and complex Nazi leaders were neither wonderful nor offensive; rather, they presented a challenge, the same one Stirlitz posed to Schlag. How did the film reveal, and how could viewers tell, “what measure of good” or “level of evil” was to be found among the film’s alluring and complicated Nazis? The difficulty, as explained by Evgenii Evstigneev, one of the actors in Seventeen Moments, in an article in Literaturnaia gazeta, was that genuine evil was never obvious. “No person thinks of himself as a scoundrel,” said Evstigneev, responding to criticism that Oleg Tabakov’s Schellenberg was too charming. “If a character appears on the surface to be an educated person, then that is how he should be played.” This left the viewer, however, entirely without any hints about his real character—there was, in effect, no way to tell, from their appearance and behavior, that the film’s Nazis were meant to be abhorrent, not admirable. “Not the hero’s charm, but his actions allow the viewer to draw an objective conclusion about his personality. The unmasking [razoblachenie] of Schellenberg,” Evstigneev explained, “was not in his external appearance, or in his soft smile.” Instead, what unmasked Schellenberg and the “other Hitlerite high priests [bonz],” according to Evstigneev, was “fascism itself as a state policy and ideology.”60

This was a frequent argument in the press discussions that followed Seventeen Moments’ broadcast in August 1973: many critics stressed that what ultimately defined the Nazi characters was their place in an immoral system, rather than their individual characteristics; exposure of Nazi criminality could be accomplished only by inanimate documentary facts. “The newsreel clips accuse and unmask,” wrote one critic.⁶¹ The critic and scholar Vasilii Kisun’ko argued that one of the film’s oddest features—the presentation and reading aloud of Gestapo “personnel files” for various major and minor characters—were what exposed the evil of the Nazi system. The files’ creators “turned all of the fascist leaders’ individuality into total facelessness . . . expressing the real state of affairs.”⁶² As Gorky Studio editor Anatolii Balikhin suggested to his fellow members of the Gorky Studio council, “we shouldn’t attempt to expose [the Nazi characters’] spiritual world. The spiritual world of these people is exposed by the personnel files and [documentary] images.”⁶³

However, the admission that the appearance and behavior of the film’s Gestapo men could not reveal their ethical corruption directly contradicted another central theme of the film and its public discussion: the supposed power of television to grant viewers penetrating vision into the souls of the film’s characters. Shortly before he argued that the Nazi characters behavior could reveal nothing about their morality, Evstigneev had stressed the power of television to penetrate souls and thoughts. TV, he wrote, using language that was repeated from article to article, was able to “look more closely into heroes, more carefully analyze their relationships,” offering viewers the ability “to observe the progress of thoughts, the movement of the soul.”⁶⁴

Both Seventeen Moments and the public conversations it inspired thus reflected a profound uncertainty about whether television really offered viewers any meaningful view into thoughts and souls, or whether good could be discerned from evil only either via the accumulation of historical facts and evidence or via the acceptance, on faith, of the good and evil of the “systems” that had produced Stirlitz and his Gestapo colleagues, respectively. What applied to the Gestapo men applied equally to Stirlitz; while some in the Gorky Studio and the press described their delight in watching Stirlitz’s face in lengthy close-ups, others questioned whether there was really anything there to see.65

The film’s prevarication about whether seeing is believing was also, however, a question of authority: could viewers be trusted to see and understand the intended message—would each, individually, condemn the film’s antiheroes? Or did they need other, more authoritative voices to persuade them? Near the end of the film, Stalin appears and declares Stirlitz to be “honest and humble.” Criticizing the scene, Alla Gerber told the Gorky Studio group, “I wouldn’t want to return to those principles: ‘oh, well if he said so . . .’”

Arguably, however, the most important aspect of Stirlitz’s agreement with Schlag was not the ends, but the means: not the uncovering of good or evil in the film’s loyal Nazis, but the agreement that one could find both good and evil in the halls of power, the acceptance that “they too are people [tam liudi],” as several critics put it.⁶⁶ There was, of course, little uncertainty, in the postwar USSR, about the moral status of the Third Reich. However, a few years after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and more than a decade after the incomplete revelations of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the moral status of the Soviet Communist Party elite was, for some, less certain. Seventeen Moments’ crucial accommodation, therefore, was between the miniseries’ viewers and its police sponsors: it asked viewers to accept the moral complexity of Soviet power, and the humanity of those who wielded it.

After “Fanaticism,” Stirlitz

This was, however, only one side of the bargain. What, after all, would viewers get in return for accepting the moral ambiguity—and the necessity—of state power and secret police? Seventeen Moments offered several possibilities. They included a new, experimental and more inclusive politics, which recognized the lasting damage done by Stalinism and the need for new heroes and a new style of leadership. The basis of this new political accommodation would be, first, recognition of the humanity and patriotism of people on both sides of the film’s social and political divides, and second, the shared desire to maintain Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe.

As Soviet viewers immediately noticed in Seventeen Moments, the Nazis not only spoke in “our words, our formulas”—their whole world strongly resembled the postwar Soviet Union.67 This included, but was not limited to, the cut of their clothes, which, as Mark Lipovetsky has noted, resembled the European style of the late 1960s, not the mid-1940s.⁶⁸ Earlier Soviet films about the fall of Berlin, such as The Fall of Berlin (1949, directed by Chiaureli), had portrayed the final moments of Hitler’s rule as panicked, hysterical, and cruel. In Seventeen Moments, by contrast, as many viewers remarked with alarm, Berlin in 1945 appeared entirely calm, largely undestroyed, and dominated by the routines of bureaucratic hierarchy.⁶⁹ The miniseries’ use of newsreel and flashbacks to describe Nazi crimes (when they were discussed at all) had the effect of removing the regime’s crimes either temporally, to the past, or geographically, to the front. Those main characters who have experienced Nazi prisons and concentration camps, notably Professor Pleishner, have all been freed by the time they appear on screen. Like Khrushchev’s Gulag returnees, they are marked by past trauma that has left lasting wounds; we learn multiple times that Pleishner has been morally and physically weakened by his time in a concentration camp.⁷⁰ The most immediate crimes of these Nazi officers are of a variety far more relevant to late Soviet political life. Writing in the newspaper Sovetskaia kul’tura, one critic described the film’s Nazi crimes as one might criticize the intrigues and corruption of the Party elite of the 1970s. “In general,” he wrote, “the fascist leadership [verkhushka] of the Reich, rotten through and through in the struggle for power and influence of the political realm, steeped in money-making and legalized robbery, is shown in the film very impressively and clearly.”⁷¹

Along with a venal power structure, the film’s world shares with the post-Stalin USSR the problems of a demanding technocratic elite, whose desire for consumer goods and professional intellectual freedom raise continual problems. Stirlitz talks blithely about “different-thinking [inakomyslie]” and “reforging [perekovanie],” both keywords in Soviet debates about intellectuals and dissent.72 Here, as other scholars have noted, the film promises that these intellectual and consumer demands should, ideally, be accommodated. In the first episode, Stirlitz dismisses a subordinate’s concerns about a prisoner who has been listening to foreign (enemy) radio broadcasts—“people came up with radio in order to listen to it,” he demurs; “so what if this guy listened a little too much.” Moments later he muses that, if the prisoner is a real scholar, he should be put to work on military projects and given a “little house in the pine forest,” with “plenty of bread and butter”—a scenario quite reminiscent of Soviet scientific colonies and secret military cities.⁷³ Under those circumstances this prisoner would, Stirlitz insisted, immediately stop “blabbing [boltat’].”

The film did not offer, however, a simple, one-to-one Aesopian analogy for contemporary Soviet life: rather, it evoked multiple historical moments at the same time, creating an effect Elena Prokhorova calls “temporal collapse.”⁷⁴ Alongside settings reminiscent of bureaucratic life under Brezhnev’s gerontocracy, Seventeen Moments included scenes that recall the tense atmosphere of Stalin’s final years. The series is set, after all, just months before the death of a dictator, who still elicits terror but whose impending defeat is evident to all. Machinations for control of the post-Hitler state form the basis of the film’s plot. In an early scene, Stalin himself diagnoses the problem, instructing Stirlitz’s handler to look for the source of the plot to conclude a separate peace among Hitler’s “closest associates.” Echoing his historical counterpart’s paranoia, Stalin in Seventeen Moments tells the NKVD chief that “the closest associates of a tyrant who is about to fall will betray him in order to save their own lives.” The film also hinted at the risks faced by Soviet agents abroad under Stalin. When the Russian radio operator Kathe (Katia) is caught and, with guidance from Stirlitz, pretends to agree to collaborate with her captors, she asks that they guarantee that she will not be allowed to fall back into her old masters’ hands—an on-screen acknowledgment of Stalin’s unforgiving stance toward anyone who had spent time behind enemy lines. Seventeen Moments’ multiple references, delivered in all seriousness, to killing people by arranging for them to be in an automobile accident likewise recall the death of legendary Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, who was killed in exactly this manner in 1948. Rather than presenting a mirror image of the contemporary USSR, therefore, Seventeen Moments’ Nazi Berlin suggested the centrality of the totalitarian past in the Soviet, post-totalitarian present. This was fitting, since the dilemmas of Stalinism and post-Stalinism addressed by the miniseries were equally uncontained, shaping contemporary Soviet political life and recurring in the Eastern European satellites.

The film addressed the legacy of a totalitarian past most explicitly in a scene that Lioznova added to the screenplay, in which an unnamed Nazi general enters Stirlitz’s train cabin and begins speaking his mind. Cursing Hitler and the German diplomatic corps, the general explains the failure of the Nazi system in terms of a broader problem of “fanaticism.” This problem, however, was not fanaticism’s violence or intolerance. Instead, the problem is that fanaticism “cannot provide a lasting victory. Fanatics can triumph initially,” the general explained, “but they can’t sustain their victory. Because” people grow tired of fanaticism, and “they grow tired of themselves.” The general’s account of the evolution of a political system based on fanaticism hardly describes the Nazi system, which was defeated at the height of its ideological fervor. The problems of popular exhaustion and declining enthusiasm after decades of violence and upheaval did, however, preoccupy Stalin’s successors.

The general then goes on to articulate one of the central concerns of post-Stalin Soviet culture: the lasting impact of the cult of personality on individual Soviet citizens and on political culture as a whole.75 Stirlitz asks the general whether he would obey an order from his commander, Albert Kesselring, to surrender; the general responds that Kesselring could never give such a command, because he trained under Hermann Göring, and “a person who worked under any kind of supreme leader [vozhd’] loses initiative . . . loses the ability to make independent decisions.” After “fanaticism,” the film suggests, comes a need for a new generation of authoritative leaders, able to act and think independently, and thus able to establish lasting rule on a new, post-fanatical basis.

While this call for new heroes and a new style of leadership would have been familiar to educated viewers from discussions of domestic politics in the cultural press of the 1950s and ’60s, here it appears in a decidedly imperial context. As Lipovetsky has observed, the outcome of Stirlitz’s assignment—preventing separate peace talks limited to the Western Front—did not contribute to the overall outcome of the war, which was already clear by the spring of 1945. Instead, what Stirlitz enables is the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.76

In the wake of 1956 and 1968, the inadequacy of “fanaticism” as a lasting basis for rule was quite apparent in the Eastern European satellites as well. The “spring” in Seventeen Moments of Spring might very well be read as a reference to the Prague Spring, which took place just a year before Semenov’s novel was published.⁷⁷ Seen in this light, Seventeen Moments combines a muscular defense of the righteousness of Soviet imperial dominance with gestures toward greater tolerance for intellectuals and limited public discussion of political life. It thus offers an alternative “spring” based on respect for the moral foundations of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe—the heroism of the Soviet people in the Second World War. As the director Grigorii Britikov pointed out during the Gorky Studio discussion, the film was intended not only for the “millions of viewers in our country, but for millions of viewers in other countries.” In light of this international audience, he continued, the film must “remind those millions of viewers” about the moral underpinnings of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, or, as Britikov put it, “about the way things were.”⁷⁸

Seventeen Moments includes a number of rather heavy-handed messages about the nobility of the Soviet mission in wartime Eastern Europe and the fruit these efforts will soon bear in the postwar period. Stirlitz, apparently an ethnic Russian (unlike the real-life German agent on whom his character was ostensibly based), acts alone; his handful of German collaborators are all either under his command or, in the case of Pleishner’s brother, already dead. In the fifth episode, we hear Stirlitz, in a moment of bitterness, think [via Kopelian’s voiceover] to himself: “I am doing for them [the Germans] what they ought to be doing for themselves.” Indeed, the film’s total neglect of the German resistance led Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, to insist on the insertion of a scene in which Stirlitz fondly reminisces about the (likewise dead) German Communist Ernst Thälmann.⁷⁹

Although, as critics at the time noted, Seventeen Moments entirely excludes everyday life, romantic love, and family dynamics—the essential subjects and viewpoint of TV movies in both the United States and Czechoslovakia, for example—the film does in fact revolve around a kind of sexless, imperial nuclear family.80 This family is completed as Stirlitz drives his Russian agent Kathe/Katia safely to Switzerland along with two babies—one hers with her (now dead) husband Ernst, and one belonging to Helmut, the good-hearted German soldier who has killed Kathe’s Gestapo guards and torturers only to die himself soon thereafter. With both fathers dead, Stirlitz steps into their role and helps Kathe/Katia smuggle the two babies to safety. Lest viewers miss the significance, Kathe’s Soviet baby is a boy, Helmut’s German baby a girl, offering a gendered evocation of the hierarchical relationship between the two countries. From this adoptive Soviet family, we understand, will spring future families. Lengthy shots of the two babies bundled together in the back seat of Stirlitz’s car provided ample time to put two and two together.

It is thus Stirlitz who secures the socialist future of Eastern Europe, his personality that offers a model of efficacy that answers the crisis of leadership in a post-fanatical political culture. As with many earlier heroes of Thaw journalism, Stirlitz’s inner thoughts and decisive actions were meant to provide a new, post-Stalin model personality. As many critics recognized, however, Stirlitz had a quite different relationship to ideology and power, one that required both artifice and persuasion, and that was always predicated on submission to authority.

Lioznova’s decision to include an actor playing Stalin in the series provided many opportunities for revealing comparisons and intertextual allusions that position Stirlitz as a post-Stalin hero. In one seemingly unimportant shot, Lioznova draws a direct connection between her Stirlitz and the cinematic Stalin at the height of the personality cult. Seventeen Moments was, of course, not the first Soviet film to portray Berlin in the months before its fall—it was preceded by The Fall of Berlin. In that epic two-part film, scored by Dmitri Shostakovich, Stalin appears very frequently; the film’s central message, as one scholar has argued, is that the war was won primarily by Stalin’s genius.⁸¹ In the first shot of Stalin in The Fall of Berlin, the “Great Gardener” tends his rose bushes (figure 15). Lioznova recreates this scene early in Seventeen Moments, with Stirlitz as gardener in a darker, colder, post-Edenic scene—not full summer, but earliest spring; not full color, but black and white. Stalin uses a hoe to cultivate the soil around the base of a young tree; Stirlitz rakes away dead leaves (figure 16).

FIGURE 15. Stalin gardening in The Fall of Berlin (directed by Chiaureli, 1949)

The differences between these two films’ credits likewise suggest how Stirlitz was to displace Stalin at the top of artistic and political hierarchies. Both movies feature both a cinematic Stalin and another chief protagonist; in The Fall of Berlin that hero is a celebrated worker who enlists in the war effort and ends up helping deliver the Soviet flag to the top of the Reichstag. In the 1950 film, the titles first list the actor playing Stalin, then the group of actors portraying other government and military leaders, and only then the humble male lead. In those episodes of Seventeen Moments that include Stalin (played by Andro Koboladze), however, the titles name Tikhonov/Stirlitz first, followed by Koboladze/Stalin, followed by the rest of the cast.

The discussions of these two dramatic characters in the Gorky Studio meetings suggest how Stirlitz was constructed in conscious opposition to Stalin. Perhaps thinking of the portrayal of Stalin in films like The Fall of Berlin, Lioznova told the group that she had been careful to avoid the implication that Stirlitz had played any implausibly central role in the war effort. Responding to questions and objections from the Gorky Studio council about the film’s inclusion of newsreel footage of major battles presented as Stirlitz’s thoughts and memories—a set of “memories” so vast and inclusive that it was physically impossible for Stirlitz to have personally experienced them—Lioznova explained that the point of these scenes was to show that “however brilliant an intelligence agent he was, the fate of the war was decided not by Stirlitz, but by the enormous effort of the people.” We tried, she told the studio representatives, “to make Stirlitz not a superspy, but a person, who wholeheartedly, with every part of his being, does what he has been entrusted to do. He is assigned a task, and he does it as best as he can. He’s a talented person and he does things the way he is supposed to.”82 For Lioznova, one of Stirlitz’s most important qualities was exactly this obedience to those who give him orders. In the Gorky Studio comments quoted above, Lioznova repeated the fact that Stirlitz does what he is told three times in row; the characterization of Stirlitz as both talented and obedient was echoed by other Gorky Studio members as well.⁸³

FIGURE 16. Stirlitz rakes away dead leaves

In the Gorky Studio discussions, Koboladze’s Stalin served as a foil for this modest and obedient Stirlitz. There was nearly universal agreement that the scenes in which Koboladze/Stalin appeared were very stilted. Several studio members criticized Koboladze’s acting as far below the level of the rest of the film; one argued that Stalin’s appearance played only an “informational role” and could be represented by having Kopelian read the letter he dictates to Roosevelt and Churchill late in the film.84 Lioznova accepted this criticism, responding that she agreed wholeheartedly, and explaining the scenes’ weakness in terms of the burdensome bureaucratic strictures on the representation of Stalin. The production team was obliged to hire an actor who was already authorized to portray Stalin; they had even had to bring on a makeup artist from Mosfilm who had experience with the exigencies of Stalin’s makeup. To Lioznova, however, the greatest problem with Koboladze’s performance was not only its oversimplification of Stalin’s “complex” image, however, but his vanity and “self-satisfaction.” In the final Stalin scene, Lioznova explained, they had added lengthy shots of the secretary taking dictation, in order to reduce the screen time devoted to “this overly inflated person.”⁸⁵ These qualities of Koboladze’s Stalin contrasted sharply with the “honest and humble” Stirlitz, who “fulfills [his] responsibilities carefully and [doesn’t] intend to offend anyone.” Nonetheless, it is Stalin who, with those two adjectives, defines Stirlitz, not the other way around.

Stirlitz’s honesty and humility, the characteristics that might serve, the film suggests, as a new, post-fanatical foundation for Soviet society and empire—were in fact in considerable tension with each other. “Honesty” was a keyword of the years after Stalin’s death, associated with greater truthfulness about (some of) Stalin’s crimes, the difficult circumstances of Soviet everyday life, and a search for authenticity and truthfulness in art and personal relationships in the wake of the fear and “varnishing of reality” of the Stalin era.⁸⁶ This Thaw-era idea of “honesty” is thus linked, however tacitly, to the criticism of (the past role of) state and Party authority, while potentially remaining in support of original, revolutionary goals. Stirlitz, by contrast, is presented as having attained this form of honesty-as-authenticity without adopting any critical stance toward his Soviet handlers; even his criticism of the Nazi system remains mostly implicit; it is only evident via the authoritative voiceover’s narration of Stirlitz’s thoughts. The idea that Stirlitz is in any meaningful sense “honest” itself requires a certain amount of imagination, given that Stirlitz/Isaev is constantly wearing a mask and deceiving almost everyone he meets. Instead, Stirlitz’s “honesty” is an inner quality unrelated to his truthfulness at any given moment; this inner honesty is somehow transparent to people whom he is actively deceiving, such as Eismann, who “cannot believe that Stirlitz could be dishonest.” Stirlitz’s honesty springs, as he tells Schlag during the interrogation scene in episode 4, not from any aspect of his behavior, or from any critical relationship to power, but from the honesty of his “goals”—that is, the goals of Soviet foreign policy and, more immediately, the NKVD.87 Stirlitz’s honesty is thus directly produced by his subordination to the noble goals of the Soviet system and his “humbleness” before the authority of his political leaders. Paradoxically, it is this humility and certainty about the rightness of his mission that allows Stirlitz, as a post-Thaw cinematic hero, to overcome the political legacies of “fanaticism”—making him able to act independently and to establish trust with others.⁸⁸

Stirlitz’s modesty and obedience are also not entirely straightforward. While his overall mission is set by his handler, “Alex,” the head of Soviet intelligence (and presumably Stalin above him), Stirlitz receives messages from what he most often calls, vaguely, “the center” only a handful of times. For the rest of the film, we see him both acting independently and following the orders of two Nazi superior officers, Müller and Walter Schellenberg. Stirlitz’s careful obedience to both, even as they compete with one another aggressively, offers little in the way of comforting moral certainty. The moral rightness of Stirlitz’s mission, based in the superiority of the Soviet system, is something that the viewer must accept on faith, encouraged by Kopelian’s authoritative voiceover, without direct evidence. The film thus allows another reading, one that emphasizes the need for compromise and tolerance, in an environment of both conflict and mutual respect. The term for this competitive, but rule-bound, behavior is one of the film’s keywords, “play,” a word that is frequently used by or otherwise linked to Stirlitz.

This reading is furthered by the fact that Müller and Schellenberg represent, among other things, two poles of the Soviet Party elite. Schellenberg, whom we see in his ornate home in a silk dressing gown, surrounded by works of art, is the cynical cosmopolitan; Müller, who tells Stirlitz that he feels uncertain about how to eat an apple in polite company, is the former proletarian. Stirlitz, a scientist by training who combines a love for Paris and cognac with the habit of occasionally roasting potatoes in his fireplace, mediates between them. He also mediates between Müller and Schellenberg on the one hand, and the film’s intelligentsia characters on the other.89 His honesty, as we experience it in 90 percent of the film’s action, is not honesty in any literal sense, but in fidelity to shared rules of the game, which includes opponents in a world bounded by mutual respect.

To an imagined intelligentsia audience the film offered many things—intellectual freedom to pursue their work, tolerance for minor infractions like listening to foreign radio broadcasts, the fantasy of security and consumer goods. Perhaps most important, the film recognized, however grudgingly, the Soviet intelligentsia’s loyalty and value to the state. When, in Bern, Stirlitz learns of Pleishner’s suicide, the Kopelian voiceover informs us that Stirlitz finally understood that Pleishner, whose trustworthiness Stirlitz had questioned earlier, “was not a traitor.” The cultural press likewise emphasized the ethical stature of the film’s intelligentsia characters, Pleishner and Schlag. Pleishner was a person “deformed [sognutyi] by the regime and by fear,” one critic wrote, “but still able to make a choice . . . [Schlag] also made a choice.”⁹⁰ Thus Seventeen Moments offered recognition of the intelligentsia’s loyalty and service in exchange for acceptance of the Soviet project’s moral superiority, recognition of the humanity of their internal opponents, and collaboration with those opponents in a shared game.

This aspect of the film, in turn, helps partially explain the film’s historical and geographical displacement to enemy territory. The film’s setting, and Nazi masks, make possible the open expression and mediation of conflicting viewpoints about the Soviet system—the testing of conflicting arguments about patriotism, freedom, obedience to authority, and other practical and interpretive problems of Soviet political life, including its life as an imperial power in Europe. Nearly all the characters in the film—from female stenographers without any lines of dialogue to Müller himself—encounter seditious speech directly, either in their capacity as members of the secret police listening in, or in conversations that are expressly not being recorded or can have no consequences, such as Stirlitz’s conversation with the general in a train or with Müller in his office. Sometimes they react, but sometimes, as with the female stenographers listening in to interrogations, we simply see a thoughtful expression, a tilted head. As Stephen Lovell has pointed out, the scene on the train in which Stirlitz and the general engage in an elaborate debate about the moral price of cynicism—the claim to simply be following orders, and one’s responsibility in a system led by a violent dictator—closely resembles the private “kitchen talk” of the late Soviet era.91 In a sense, the entire film is such a conversation, to which guests of very diverse views and stakes in the matter have been invited. V. D. Dorman praised this aspect of the film in the first Gorky Studio discussion. “I admire the fact that this is a film,” he said, “in which people of opposing camps, different kinds of people, allow themselves to think.”⁹² Viewers could evaluate these conflicting viewpoints in the safety of their homes, with family and friends around the television. As Stirlitz tells a young border guard, “it’s safe [to talk openly] with me, but I don’t recommend doing so with others.” The film, with its official sponsorship and explicitly patriotic plot, guaranteed viewers a safe environment in which to hear, explore, and discuss a variety of difficult, potentially seditious thoughts.

Laughing with Stirlitz

Seventeen Moments was an extraordinarily serious film, an expensive and high-stakes experiment that explored, over nearly fourteen hours, the most important political, personal, and artistic problems of its time. Why, then, was it so funny, becoming the subject of tens of thousands of jokes and founding one of the most prominent subgenres of late Soviet jokes, the “Stirlitz joke”?⁹³ Scholars have offered multiple explanations for the ubiquity of Stirlitz jokes, reading them as a response to both the miniseries’ inherent subversiveness and to its ideological purity and seriousness.⁹⁴ I would like to add another explanation—that the film’s many contradictions were designed to invite viewer participation, including via these jokes, and that this participation complemented the film, rather than undermining it.

At least two members of the Gorky Studio seem to have experienced the miniseries—before its broadcast launched a thousand jokes—as specifically lacking humor. Bremener’s comment comparing Stirlitz unfavorably to an earlier Soviet literary trickster, Babel’s Benia Krik, suggested that Stirlitz would benefit from a bit more style and fun. Frez made a similarly prescient remark at the first Gorky Studio session. “What’s missing here,” he observed, “is a smile, which is really necessary. It needs a few phrases that would evoke a smile.”95 Jokes about Stirlitz stepped into this breach. It is possible to argue that the film in fact includes such moments of lightness, although they are visual rather than verbal. The shot of Stirlitz staring down a stuffed chimpanzee, a sudden cut to his face “concealed” behind an absurd fake mustache—both suggest that Lioznova was not entirely without a smile while making the film. Smiles, after all, suggest a recognition of shared experience or beliefs, openness to further social bonding, or the achievement of a common understanding—all of which the film sought to promote between “functionaries” and intelligentsia. The rare instances when Stirlitz cracks a smile come at the precise moments when he forges a connection with Schlag and then Pleishner—they correspond to the sealing of the deal laid out by the film.

As Stirlitz jokes suggest, viewers laughed about Seventeen Moments of Spring’s most extreme artistic experiments, all the things that made this a Soviet TV movie and not a Western one—its astonishingly lengthy close-ups, its extraordinarily slow pacing, its autumnal, nostalgic atmosphere, the creaking mechanics of the plot that held it all together. “Stirlitz opened a door,” one joke begins. “The lights went on. Stirlitz closed the door. The lights went out. Stirlitz opened the door again. The lights went on again. Stirlitz closed the door. The lights went out again. It’s a refrigerator, Stirlitz thought.”⁹⁶ People laughed at the resemblances between the film’s Nazis and their own bureaucrats, and the similarities and differences between Stirlitz and previous iconic film characters, like Chapaev. All of this wrote Stirlitz and his colleagues into the cultural and social fabric of Soviet life, often on the terms the film suggested: greater, if grudging, mutual respect and tolerance, constrained by regard for a shared heroic past, commitment to empire and thus to the authorities, whom, as Lioznova put it, “we cannot live without.”

Seventeen Moments of Spring, and the public conversations and negotiations it brought into being, exemplified all of the most important traits of “stagnation”-era culture—slowness, boredom, nostalgia, irony, and the aging of the regime. It was precisely these features, however, that facilitated and brought into being the other side of stagnation culture: experimentation, open-endedness, lively debate (dressed up in various disguises and displaced abroad), and the desire for inclusion and social unity. The basis of that unity, moreover, was not primarily consumer goods, although those were certainly present in everyone’s imagined good life. Instead, Seventeen Moments suggested that the Soviet way of life was about something more meaningful—shared values and shared belief in Soviet heroism in the war. The Soviet TV movie, of which Seventeen Moments of Spring was the most famous and most successful example, would teach viewers to see, to recognize the superiority of that way of life even in an environment of unprecedented uncertainty and moral complexity, after Prague and so near the beguiling, détente-era West.