In Seventeen Moments of Spring, Stierlitz is the cover name for a Soviet super-spy Colonel Maxim Maximovich Isaуev, whose real name is Vsevolod Vladimirovich Vladimirov. Stierlitz takes a key role in SS Reich Main Security Office in Berlin during World War II, infiltrating Ausland-SD headed by Walter Schellenberg. Working deep undercover, Stierlitz tries to collect intelligence about the Germans' war plans and communicate it to Moscow. He receives instructions from Moscow on how to proceed, on one occasion traveling to Switzerland on a secret mission. He diverts the German nuclear "Vengeance Weapon" research program into a fruitless dead-end, thwarts separate peace talks between Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, engages in intellectual games with members of the Nazi high command and sacrifices his own happiness for the good of his motherland. Despite being racked with desire to return home to his wife he subordinates his feelings to his duty, thus embodying an idealised Soviet vision of patriotism. Stierlitz is quite an opposite of the action-oriented James Bond; most of the time he gains his knowledge without any Bond-style stunts and gadgets, while in the film adaptation of the stories the action is presented through a narrative voice-over by Yefim Kopelyan. He is presented in a deeply patriotic but non-ideological light, fighting to defend the Soviet motherland against external enemies rather than just defending the Communist government against its ideological opponents.
Although Stierlitz was a much-loved character, he was also the butt of a common genre of Russian jokes, often satirising his deductive trains of thought, with unexpected twists, delivered in the deadpan style of the voice-overs in the film adaptations; for example: Stierlitz continues to be a popular character in modern Russia. Despite the fact that references and Stierlitz jokes still penetrate contemporary speech, Seventeen Moments of Spring is very popular mainly because it is quite patriotic. It is repeated annually on Russian television, usually around Victory Day. Stierlitz also continues to have a political significance. When his portrayer Vyacheslav Tikhonov died in December 2009, the Foreign Intelligence Service—one of the successor organisations of the former Soviet KGB—sent its condolences to his family. Ivan Zassoursky notes that Russian Prime MinisterVladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, has been portrayed as "embod the image—very important for the Russian television audience—of Standartenführer von Stierlitz... If anyone missed the connection between Putin, who served in Germany, and von Stierlitz, articles in the press reminded them of the resemblance and helped create the association." The connection went both ways; Putin was strongly influenced by the novels, commenting: "What amazed me most of all was how one man's effort could achieve what whole armies could not." Stierlitz movies contributed a number of catchphrases, such as "Character: nordic, robust".
