James Bond's Socialist Rivals

2024-10-24

Abstract Focusing on three blockbuster television series from the Soviet Union, Poland, and East Germany, James Bond’s Socialist Rivals recovers an essential aspect of the history of popular culture in Europe’s Cold War East. As in the West, fictitious spy characters achieved mass appeal through film. In their countries, and often beyond them as well, the protagonists of Seventeen Moments of Spring, Stakes Greater than Life, and The Invisible Visor were as prominent as super-agent icon James Bond on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The actors playing them were stars, and their roles as spy heroes defined their public image. For authoritarian political regimes in search of popular legitimacy, these shows offered an ideal blend merging ideological messages and suspenseful entertainment. Shaped by their cultural and political backgrounds in three societies in a heterogeneous postwar Eastern Europe, they also came to reflect different responses to the Bond phenomenon in the West.

Inventing a Soviet Russian Popular Culture Icon The Context and Origins of <i>Seventeen Moments</i>

2024-10-24

Abstract Chapter 3 explores the origins and massive success of the Soviet television series Seventeen Moments of Spring. It details the twelve-part structure of this series and summarizes its complex plot and explains the relationship between writer Iulian Semionov’s original novel and the series as directed by Tatiana Lioznova for the Gorky Studio in Moscow. The chapter sketches the qualities of the Shtirlits superspy character, as developed specifically in “Seventeen Moments” and its great popularity in Soviet and Russian popular culture. The making and success of the show is put in the context of comparable Soviet productions for cinema and television, such as The Shield and the Sword. It also addresses a deliberate KGB public relations policy and the Soviet and specifically Russian memory of the “Great Fatherland War” between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and the marginalization of the memory of the Holocaust.

Cold War between the Germanies

2024-10-24

Abstract Chapter 5 addresses the context and making of the East German 1970s spy film franchise The Invisible Visor. It explains the East German idea of the noble agent, the Kundschafter, sketches Visor’s defining storyline, reconstructs the lopsided television rivalry between West and East Germany, and discusses Visor’s political significance and how the series was made. It details the close cooperation between its creators and East Germany’s intelligence service and secret police, the Stasi. The chapter discusses Visor’s presentation as fiction with a fundamental claim to political and historical truth that included allegations of contemporary Western subversion and crimes and references to Nazism. The chapter embeds The Invisible Visor in the history of the postwar competition between West and East Germany, in general and in the sphere of television in particular. Furthermore, it shows that, despite some similarities, the Bond movies were not a major influence on The Invisible Visor.

Notes on Terminology and Transliteration

2024-10-24

Memory Capture from “De-communization” to “Decolonization”

Cultural Politics an International Journal · 2024-11-01

Abstract German historian of modern Ukraine Tarik Cyril Amar positions the third year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (February 2022) between an analysis of escalated culture wars within Ukraine and its resonance for Anglo-American/European liberalism, whose most influential representatives suppress consideration of class-based, ethnicized contradictions that underlie the appeal to national self-determination, following the Maidan revolution of 2014. The discussion considers how notable “bellicists” of contemporary Anglo-Atlantic liberalism mobilize the Maidan's aspiration for EU and NATO membership (envisioned as the accomplishment of higher standards of living and a middle-class European Ukraine) while instrumentalizing the brutalities of the Russian invasion for a conjuncture marked by the eclipse of the “war on terror,” and the attendant exigencies of US-led realignment. Also a historian of the Holocaust, Amar reflects on his established study on the anomalous origins of “Soviet Ukraine” in the city of Lviv during the course of alternating occupation by Soviets and Nazis, in order to draw a sobering link between the twentieth century; the current, state-led “normalization” of memories of collaborationist violence during the interlude of Nazi rule (1941 – 44); and the prospect for a meaningful political future for Ukraine, in the wake of this war. Amar also indicates the unpopularity of such a position in the aftermath of February 2022 by pointing to the emergence of a new-left politics of identity, which, under the sign of “decolonization,” accelerates previous state-led efforts to erase traces of communist or Russian history from the built environment, cultural production, literature, and textbooks, even while consigning to illiberality the generally poorer, less educated Russian-speaking opposition to Maidan (from eastern and southern Ukraine). While Amar emphasizes unevenness within his discussion of the sovereigntist position and, more specifically, its uses by an Atlanticist geopolitical agenda, he also indicates its own appropriation of “third-world” vocabularies of emancipation (circulated through the rubric of “decoloniality” out of academic and cultural institutions of the West). The discussion draws links to the ongoing obliteration of Gaza and its alibi—insufficiently challenged by the Maidan generation of activists—in the West's memory culture of the Holocaust.

World War II and the Holocaust

2024-10-24

Abstract This chapter discusses the breakthrough success of the television series Stakes Greater than Life in postwar Poland. It details the political and cultural background of 1960s Poland. Stawka’s enormous resonance cannot be understood without considering sensitive issues of national experience and identity. The series emerged in one of the countries most affected by World War II and at an important point in the development of its historical memory, when a young generation without personal memory of the war grew to adulthood, while, at the same time, television was rapidly increasing its hold on popular culture. The chapter explores Stawka’s place in Poland’s culture of memory, in particular with regard to questions of nationalism under Soviet hegemony. The chapter also probes Stawka’s omissions. Its most pronounced silence concerned the Holocaust. The chapter shows that this was a deliberate choice over an existing alternative.

Andrii Portnov. Dnipro: An Entangled History of a European City. Boston: Academic Studies Press. 374 pp. Notes Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Tables. $40.00, paper.

Slavic Review · 2024-01-01

A Cold War Conjuncture

2024-10-24

Abstract Chapter 7 discusses similarities and differences between Stakes Greater than Life, Seventeen Moments of Spring, and The Invisible Visor. It also compares the spy hero popular culture of the Cold War East with that of the West. The chapter explores the relationship between the memory of World War II and the Cold War. It also details the diversity of the Cold War East and shows that images of the Cold War Other depended on the trajectories of national history. Also discussed are the historically unprecedented global rise of the spy to the status of popular culture hero; the development of public relations by secret police and intelligence agencies; and the emergence of traditional—predigital and pre-internet—television as the most dynamic and single most important mass media of the Cold War period.

Agent Rising in the Reich – The Shield and the Sword

2023-07-07

This chapter explains the importance of The Shield and the Sword, and provides a very short synopsis of its convoluted plot. It discusses two key aspects of the films: the depiction of Soviet intelligence, in particular of the ideal agent, and the image of its, and his (usually, his), opponents with reference to both the movies themselves and two types of sources, namely the files about their production preserved at the Mosfilm Studio and various articles published in Soviet print media. The chapter offers some reflections on how The Shield and the Sword and the genre of Soviet intelligence movies that it belonged to related to and can be compared with the James Bond franchise, in particular its foundational movies of the 1960s, and, to an extent, more generally with a certain type of intelligence film made in the West.

Lviv and Wrocław, Cities in Parallel? Myth, Memory and Migration, c.1890-Present. Ed. Jan Fellerer and Robert Pyrah. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2020. xvi, 358 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Figures. Tables. $95.00, paper.

Slavic Review · 2022-01-01

Lviv and Wrocław, Cities in Parallel? Myth, Memory and Migration, c.1890-Present. Ed. Jan Fellerer and Robert Pyrah. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2020. xvi, 358 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Figures. Tables. $95.00, paper. - Volume 81 Issue 4