Putin: The Spy as Hero

What a Fictional Soviet Secret Agent Can Tell Us About Russian Psychological Operations

Note added July 31 2024: This was our very first posting, back on April 6, 2023. It analyzed a popular Soviet spy movie that helps explain Vladimir Putin's mind games against a Western world he distrusts. We think it remains relevant today. Subsequent postings fleshed out some of these themes in more detail. For example, further detail on disinformation can be found in the three-part "Disinformation Handbook" beginning here.

Vladimir Putin’s identification card from the East German State Security Ministry (Stasi). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

If you grew up in the former Soviet Union, chances are you encountered a favorite holiday tradition, which continues in Russia to this day: watching the 1973 spy movie “Seventeen Moments of Spring.” Based on a book and TV series from the 1960s-1970s, this story of the fictional Max Otto von Stierlitz, a Soviet spy embedded in the German Nazi hierarchy in the closing months of the Second World War, evokes nostalgia in even the most cynical émigrés. Th…