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. Using the real-life
Operation Sunrise as its inspiration, both the novel and mini-series depicted
Allen Dulles, the chief of the American OSS operations for Central Europe engaging in peace talks in Switzerland with
Karl Wolff, the Higher SS Police Chief of Italy, which was historically correct; however the picture of the United States seeking an alliance with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union was not. The picture of Operation Sunrise as an attempt to form an American-German alliance was widely accepted in the Soviet Union and
Harrison Salisbury, the Moscow correspondent of
The New York Times, found himself in 1973-74 being regularly criticized by ordinary Soviet citizens who fumed at the alleged American perfidy against the Soviet Union during the Dulles-Wolff talks. However, there is a kernel of truth to the version of the Dulles-Wolff talks offered in
Seventeen Moments of Spring in that the Soviets were not informed of Operation Sunrise at first, and expressed much suspicion of Operation Sunrise when they did learn of the talks, believing that Dulles was engaged in something underhanded against them. An aspect of both the novel and TV versions of
Seventeen Moments of Spring that has greatly annoyed Westerners who are more accustomed to seeing spy stories via the prism of the fast-paced Bond stories is the way that Stierlitz spends much time interacting with ordinary Germans who he meets during his long walks on the streets and parks of Berlin despite the fact these interactions do nothing to advance the plot as these scenes are utterly superfluous to the story. However, the point of these scenes are to show that Stierlitz is still a moral human being, who remains sociable and kind to all people, including the citizens of the state that his country is at war with despite the way that state has killed millions of his own people. Unlike Bond, Stierlitz is devoted to his wife who he deeply loves and despite spending at least ten years as a spy in Germany and having countless chances to sleep with attractive German women remains faithful towards her. The brooding, thoughtful and quiet Stierlitz who remains devoted to his wife who he has not seen for years reflects a certain Russian ideal of a romantic hero. In an entirely unrealistic scene, Stierlitz's beloved wife is smuggled into Berlin to be allowed to see him from a café in Berlin opposite another café on the other side of the street which he is in; for six minutes Stierlitz and his wife stare longingly at each other before departing without saying a word. Though Stierlitz is a spy for the NKVD, as the Soviet secret police was known from 1934 to 1946, it is stated quite explicitly in ''Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny
(which is set in 1945) that he left the Soviet Union to go undercover in Nazi Germany "more than ten years ago", which means that Stierlitz was not involved in any way in the Yezhovshchina''. Unlike most Soviet productions, Stierlitz is described as working for Russia rather than the Soviet Union or "the party", suggesting that he is first and foremost a Russian patriot rather than a Communist. Unlike many Soviet productions, most of the ordinary Germans, Stierlitz meets are portrayed in a favorable light with the implied message that the ordinary Germans were not responsible for Nazi crimes. Instead, the message of both the book and the TV show was that ordinary Germans were in a certain sense victims of the Nazi leaders who are shown as treating their own people with a callous contempt. Though ''Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny
was a KGB-sponsored production, many people who saw the mini-series viewed the Stierlitz character as a metaphor for dissidents in the Soviet Union. The way that Stierlitz, who despite being in the presence of mostly sympathetic people, has to hide at all times who he really is, what he is really doing and what he really believes, was seen as an inspiring metaphor for dissidents in the Brezhnev era Soviet Union. Much of the Soviet intelligentsia
saw parallels between Siterlitz, who can never say what he really feels and their own situation in the Soviet Union, which helped to make the character an iconic figure even to those who feared the KGB, and contributed to his appeal even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The American scholar Erik Jens has argued that the "dog whistles" in the mini-series such as scenes where Stierlitz buys luxury goods on the black markets of Berlin such as French cigarettes and cognac, which he greatly enjoys, which Soviet viewers took as an allegory for buying forbidden Western goods on Soviet black markets (a very common practice in the Soviet Union), were intentionally added in to give the series credibility with the Soviet public. The fact that Stierlitz buys goods on the black markets of Berlin that were otherwise unobtainable in a wartime economy helped to make the character more appealing to a Soviet audience in the 1970s who likewise had to frequently resort to the black markets to obtain basic goods that were not readily available in the stores. Seventeen Moments of Spring'' was unusual among Soviet television series in having a hero who enjoys certain Western luxuries as normally in Soviet TV Western luxury goods were associated with decadence and corruption and as a result shunned by the protagonists. Jens noted that Stierlitz is often called the "Russian James Bond" that description is incorrect as the Stierlitz is "...not nearly as cartoonish or formulaic a figure as Agent 007 or indeed the majority of Western, especially American, fictional spies". Jens argued that the heavy losses taken by the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War ensured that Soviet audiences could never accept an ultra-violent figure like James Bond as a hero, instead preferring a merely cerebral, intellectual hero like Stierlitz who wins by his cunning and his intelligence. Jens wrote: "No fictional Russian spy, either approved by the Kremlin or accepted by Soviet citizenry, could take such a cartoonish view of life and death as do James Bond and his countless Western imitations". Jens argued that Stierlitz is far closer to
George Smiley rather than
James Bond, but that comparison does not entirely work as: "Bond is a pop culture icon, on the same plane as Superman, Tintin, or Mickey Mouse. And however intricately and realistically John le Carré rendered him or how compellingly
Gary Oldman or the late Alec Guinness played him on-screen, Smiley remains a creature of the shadowy intelligence world, known mainly to the fans of the genre and having little to say to the wider culture". Jens wrote the character whom Stierlitz mostly closely resembles is
Atticus Finch as both characters are "morally complex and admirable" men operating in deeply amoral worlds (the segregationist Deep South of the 1930s, Nazi Germany) who do their best to retain their integrity and work to redeem despised professions (i.e. lawyer, spy). In much the same way, that the part of Atticus Finch came to be identified with
Gregory Peck, the part of Stierlitz likewise came to be identified with
Vyacheslav Tikhonov, and the Russian people have never really accepted any other actors playing the character. Jens noted that both Finch and Stierlitz play the same role in their respective national cultures as embodying certain ideals about their respective professions as Finch is the sort of lawyer that Americans wish that they had while Stierlitz is the sort of spy that Russians wish that they had. ==Influences in Russian culture==