17 Moments of Spring
43 videos • 39,645 views • by Igor17moments The negotiations between Dulles and Wolff did take place in reality on March 8, 1945, codenamed both Operation Sunrise and Operation Crossword ("Sunrise Crossword" in the film) and Soviet agents supplied information on them to the USSR. One of them was Kim Philby. Another agent of the Soviet Military Intelligence, dubbed as "a fantastic source, who received the first-class information from Germany" by Allen Dulles, was Rudolph Rassler, working in Switzerland during secret negotiations. Inventing the image of Isaev-Stirlitz, Yulian Semyonov worked with the biographies of well-known Soviet intelligence officers: Lev Manevich, Nikolai Kuznetsov, Sandor Radó. But no one of them became a prototype of the film's main character. Stirlitz is the collective image, in which the author embodied all the best features of the intelligence officer. Vyacheslav Tikhonov as StirlitzStirlitz is sometimes referred to as a Russian James Bond, even if the comparison is not entirely warranted. Although the show contains some relatively unbelievable elements (i.e. a Russian passing for a German for twenty years) and it may even have served a somewhat similar ideological role as the James Bond films did in the West, Seventeen Moments of Spring is based, even if only loosely, on actual historical events. Moreover, the show also strives for a much more realistic version of foreign espionage than the James Bond films do, with Stirlitz carefully playing on rivalries within the SD and SS, cautiously seeking out friendly contacts, prudently developing alibis for his covert activities and very rarely resorting to force or gadgetry. It is also notable that one hardly gets the impression that many of the Nazis were the incarnation of evil: while the show does remind the viewer of the horror of Nazi death camps through the use of some original footage, one nonetheless finds it hard not to take something of a liking for Heinrich Müller and some of Stirlitz' other adversaries. This is a contrast to the Bond films, where the Russian generals and leaders are either brute vodka-guzzling stereotypes, calculating evil geniuses, or just greedy people involved in schemes for money. The music for the movie was written by Armenian-born composer Mikael Tariverdiev. The series was immensely popular in the Soviet Union and it originated many popular phrases as well as an entire genre of anecdotes, the latter having seemingly taken a life of its own. The show is still frequently aired on Russian television. Plans were discussed to build a monument to Stirlitz in the city of Gorokhovets, his birth place in the series. It's been said that "for older generations, the series is little more than a factual retelling of an actual historical event - a behind-the-scenes look at a war painful to remember." "But for younger people raised from childhood on yearly showings - the film was shown one hour-long serial at a time, 12 days in a row - "Spring" became more famous for its quirky lines and surreal shots than its cinematic whole." "But "Spring's" most lasting claim to fame is the legion of anecdotes that have entered Stirlitz, Isayev and Tikhonov in the permanent annals of Russian folklore."