James Bond's socialist rivals: television spy heroes and popular culture in the Cold War East

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.