Seventeen Moments of Spring (Russian: Семнадцать мгновений весны, romanized: Semnadtsat' mgnoveniy vesny) is a 1973 Soviet twelve-part television series, directed by Tatyana Lioznova and based on the novel of the same title by Yulian Semyonov.

Stierlitz discovers, and later schemes to disrupt, the secret negotiations between Karl Wolff and Allen Dulles taking place in Switzerland, aimed at forging a separate peace between Germany and the western Allies.

Though Adolf Hitler is determined to continue the Second World War, Walter Schellenberg convinces Heinrich Himmler to conduct secret negotiations with the Americans, hoping to reach a separate peace deal which would allow the Germans to concentrate all their forces on the Eastern Front.

In the late 1960s, after Yuri Andropov became the chairman of the Soviet Union's Committee for State Security, he launched a campaign to improve the service's image, which was primarily associated in the public's view with its role in the political repressions carried out by the government.

Andropov encouraged a series of novels, songs, films and other works glorifying KGB agents, focusing on those serving abroad – mainly in the hope of attracting young and educated recruits to the organization.

[4] During 1965, author Yulian Semyonov, a Soviet writer of espionage books, composed the novel No Password Required (Russian: Пароль не нужен), in which he first introduced the character of Vsevolod Vladimirov – a young Cheka secret police agent who infiltrates Admiral Alexander Kolchak's staff under the alias Maxim Isaev.

[9] Within the novel Semyonov mentions the phrase "seventeen moments of spring" in reference to the lyrics of a song sung by Marika Rökk, a popular star in Nazi Germany.

Director Tatyana Lioznova of the Gorky Film Studio encountered Seventeen Moments of Spring while reading an excerpt of it in Znamya magazine; she determined that she would adapt it for the screen.

[10] Lioznova made several adjustments to Semyonov's material: she had in mind a character of Mrs. Saurich, an elderly German woman with whom Stierlitz was to have occasional conversations, to make him more amiable; the author hesitantly indulged her, and wrote several such scenes.

Leonid Kuravlyov was an early candidate to be cast as Hitler, but instead was given the role of SS officer Eismann; East German actor Fritz Diez portrayed the dictator, making his fifth appearance as such on screen.

Oleg Tabakov had physically resembled Walter Schellenberg, whom he portrayed in the series – the latter's niece, who resided in East Germany, even wrote the actor a letter appreciating his work;[13] at the same time, the producers lacked any photograph of Heinrich Müller, and thus chose Leonid Bronevoy, who was very different in appearance.

The first singer invited to vocalize them was Vadim Mulerman, but he was blacklisted and banned from performing in public in 1971, after including a Yiddish song in his repertoire, a move that was frowned upon by the authorities in the wake of the Six-Day War.

After Mulerman's disqualification, Muslim Magomayev was considered for the role and recorded his own version of the text; however, the producers decided that his voice was not suited for the atmosphere of series' plot, and chose Joseph Kobzon.

[10] Broadcast at 19:30 by the channel Programme One between 8 July and 24 August 1973, Seventeen Moments of Spring was immensely popular in the Soviet Union: Klaus Mehnert reported that during its original run, the estimated audience for each episode was between 50 and 80 million viewers, making it the most successful television show of its time.

[23] According to his personal assistant Alexei Chernayev, Leonid Brezhnev was a devoted fan of Seventeen Moments of Spring, and watched the entire series some twenty times.

[24] Author Anthony Olcott claimed that it was rumored Brezhnev moved meetings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in order not to miss episodes.

"[29] In 1976, director Lioznova, cinematographer Piotr Kataev and lead actors Tikhonov and Leonid Bronevoy received the Russian SFSR's Vasilyev Brothers State Prize of the RSFSR for their work on the television series.

[30] In 1982, after watching another re-run of all the episodes, Brezhnev was exceptionally moved: his bodyguard Vladimir Medvedev recalled the Soviet head of state inquired about the true identity of 'Stierlitz' for days afterwards, and wanted to award the agent the title Hero of the Soviet Union,[31] a version of events corroborated by Chernayev; the latter added that when the head of state learned Stierlitz was fictional, he ordered to award Tikhonov with the parallel civilian order, Hero of Socialist Labour.

[24] Composer Mikael Tariverdiev's wife Vera recounted that Brezhnev decided to bestow honors on other members of the crew and cast; nine years after the series' first broadcast, her husband received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for his contribution to it.

[36] Richard Sakwa commented that Stierlitz is seen acting more out of love to his homeland than due to socialist convictions, reflecting the Soviet public and government's gradual embrace of local patriotism, which replaced the international proletarian solidarity emphasized in the past.

[39] Vladimir Shlapentokh believed the series' achieved its popularity by depicting an "exciting espionage story for the masses" and at the same time, luring the Intelligentsia by making "weakly disguised parallels" between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.

"[39] Konstantin Zaleski, too, noted that the German state apparatus as portrayed in Seventeen Moments bears little resemblance to reality, but is rather reminiscent of the Stalinist system, and the Soviet one in general.

[42] Mark Lipovetsky viewed the series as a metaphor for life in the USSR at the time of its production, and believed its popularity was a consequence of this: Stierlitz – and also Schellenberg – symbolized the generation of young rebellious intellectuals who graduated from universities in the 1960s but joined the government apparatus during the early years of the Brezhnev rule.

The show also offered other messages the young intelligentsia could identify with, including an ideal portrayal of 'The West' as orderly and prosperous, although Lipovetsky also stressed that this landscape was largely a Soviet concept of how foreign lands look.

[43] Stephen Lovell wrote the series was both "an entirely orthodox piece of Cold War culture", centering on an American plot to make separate peace with the Germans which is thwarted by a man who "corresponds to the Socialist realist model of a positive hero", while also offering a "beguiling view" of the affluent, "imagined West", where private car ownership, cognac and imported coffee were in abundance – making it "a classical document of Soviet ambivalent fascination" with the West.

[50] Soviet political scientists Yuri Krasin and Alexander Galkin linked the rise of their country's Neo-Nazi movement in the 1970s with the "romantic depiction" of wartime Germany and its leaders in the series.

[56] Walter Laqueur criticized Semyonov's presentation of the events surrounding the Wolff-Dulles negotiations, claiming the author chose a "sinister interpretation of history" because a more correct depiction would "have hardly served" him.

[9] While holding the opinion that Germany, as presented in Seventeen Moments of Spring, resembled the Soviet Union more than its real counterpart, Russian historian Konstantin Zalesski also noted numerous inaccuracies, errors and inconsistencies in the series.

[58] Stierlitz was also the hero of other films and television series made throughout the years, including the 1975 Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the 1976 The Life and Death of Ferdinand Luce,[59] the 1980 Spanish Variant[60] and the 2009 Isaev.