The Peculiar Truth about the Russian James Bond

• 1945: The Soviets have planted a Russian spy deep inside Hitler’s SS. His name is Maxim Isaev, but in Germany he’s known as Max Otto von Stierlitz.

• Stierlitz infiltrated the German high command as far back as 1927 before Hitler ever came to power, and he has risen through the hierarchy to a prominent position in German intelligence circles.

• The Kremlin gives him a mission: Disrupt secret peace talks between the Nazis and the United States from which the Soviets have been excluded.

• Stierlitz tries to thwart the peace meetings between Allan Dulles, the American OSS station chief in Switzerland, and his Nazi counterpart SS leader Karl Wolff. Stierlitz engages dissidents and intellectuals to aid him in his mission.

• But they must hurry. All signs suggest World War II is drawing to a conclusion. Stierlitz has only a few weeks to complete his task. And the Gestapo are searching for a Russian spy in their midst.

• It was a fantastic story. Except none of it actually happened.

• That was the fictitious plot of a 1969 novel titled Seventeen Moments of Spring by Russian novelist Yulian Semyonov. Russians loved the book and made it a huge bestseller.

• Summer 1973: The novel was made into a Russian television series that ran for 12 episodes - 14 hours in total.

• The series became one of Russia’s most watched TV shows of all time with upwards of 80 million viewers. That same year in the US, the most watched TV program was the Super Bowl, which drew 54 million.

• Seventeen Moments of Spring was Semyonov’s third espionage novel. In 1965 he published No Password Required, which became a hit. He followed it up that same year with Major Whirlwind.

• The character of Stierlitz appeared in 11 more novels, 3 more films, and another TV series. Book titles included A Bomb for the Chairman, Third Card, and Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

• Among Semyonov’s many literary fans were Soviet Premiers Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov. The latter met the author and presented his idea of the perfect Soviet intelligence operative: calm, cunning, and clever.

• Unlike Ian Fleming’s James Bond who succeeded with action, guns, and gadgets, Stierlitz outwitted his rivals using his superior intellect. In that regard, Stierlitz was more comparable to the best characters of British spy novelist John Le Carre.

• Seventeen Moments of Spring became a cultural icon and was replayed annually until the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 20th Century.

• The TV series, as well as Semyonov’s other novels, deeply influenced a Russian law student who dreamed of joining the KGB, which he eventually did. That young man was Vladimir Putin.

• The plot of Third Card takes place in 1941 with Stierlitz in Ukraine. Semyonov often wrote real people into his novels, and Third Card portrays Stephan Bandera, the real life Nationalist leader who wanted Ukrainian independence. But Semyonov portrayed him as a cruel villain in league with the Nazis.

• 2022: Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukraine, currently led by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, needed to be rescued from Nazis, which many observers found bizarre. Some people speculated that the Russian leader might have been conflating the Semyonov novel with reality, hence his odd justification for the invasion of Ukraine.

• Max Stierlitz, the Russian James Bond, has had such a cultural impact that the fictitious character might have influenced an actual war.