While John le Carré and Ian Fleming were fighting the Cold War with their patented brand of spy novels, the Soviet Union was fighting back with its own version of the genre, albeit on a much smaller, less convoluted scale.

The Soviet Union had a version of the spy genre, too, with its own peculiarities. One of them stemmed from the fact that in Russian, there are two words for “spy.” The first is close to the English word: shpion, which means a bad guy working for the dark side. The other is razvedchik, which usually means a good guy, or at least “our son of a bitch.” The deeds of Russian razvedchiki during World War II were glorified in many books and movies, but usually the plot was very simple: a smart Russian spy against a lot of dumb Germans.

Yulian Semyonov, the only serious Russian rival of le Carré and his Western colleagues, took a radically different approach. In a series of novels, he described the career of German colonel Otto von Stirlitz, who was actually the Russian spy Maxim Isayev. In Semyonov’s books, the Germans are not always cruel and they are certainly never dumb. One of them, Seventeen Moments of Spring, describes an attempt by Britain and the United States to enter into peace talks with Nazi Germany behind the backs of their Soviet allies; the book was adapted into a 1973 miniseries that earned the unconditional love of Russian television viewers. Come to think of it, this was rather odd: the series features lots and lots of dialogue and almost no elements of a typical spy movie, such as car chases, shootouts, and gadgets; instead, the struggle between Stirlitz and his enemies is mostly intellectual. Semyonov was not very happy with the liberties that director Tatyana Lioznova took with his text. But there is little doubt that it was she who immortalized the book.