WAS FORMER KGB COLONEL VLADIMIR PUTIN A VICTIM OF KGB PROPAGANDA?: No, that isn’t the title, but it could be. The BBC is reviewing a 1973 Soviet television series about a Russian “James Bond” operating in Nazi Germany during WW2.

Westerners were growing up on the films of James Bond, Soviet citizens had their own favourite spy, a wartime agent who went under the name of Max Otto von Stierlitz. And it could easily have been Stierlitz who prompted Vladimir Putin to join the KGB, writes Dina Newman.

The USSR’s answer to James Bond was a very different kind of spy. He had no time for women or gadgets. His life was devoted entirely to his work in Berlin in World War Two, where, under cover, he infiltrated the German high command.

Stierlitz was the hero of a 12-part series, Seventeen Moments of Spring, screened on Soviet TV every year around 9 May – the date the USSR marked as the end of World War Two.

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Apart from being a gripping drama, it has a perfect Cold War plotline, with Stierlitz disrupting secret peace negotiations between the Nazis and the Americans in 1945. But the film also had another hidden purpose.

“The film showed the importance of secret agents, who are highly respected people in our country. It instilled patriotism in the post-war generation,” says Shashkova.

In fact, it was commissioned by Yuri Andropov – then head of the KGB, later the country’s leader – as part of a PR campaign designed to attract young, educated recruits.

Vladimir Putin has never said whether or not it was Stierlitz who inspired him to become a spy. But he was 21 when the film was first screened, and he joined the KGB two years later.

As for me, I prefer The Americans, since that series portrays the KGB as the reprehensibly evil force it was. Does anyone out there know precisely how many people Elizabeth and Philip have killed since Season One, Episode One?