Tarik Cyril Amar provides a detailed examination of the development and historical context of three popular television shows featuring superspies in three Soviet-era countries during the Cold War, when James Bond movies were drawing large audiences in the west. Amar, a historian of popular culture, describes three hit television series: Stawka in Poland, Seventeen Moments in the Soviet Union, and Visor in East Germany. The three series were blockbusters, helped by limitations on choice of programs and channels. One of the most interesting parts of the book is the case of East Germany, where West German television was almost fully available and created a competitive challenge for East German audiences. Two chapters detail the history and program construction in each of the three long-running series. Two short, speculative chapters conclude the book by discussing differences among the three countries in societies increasingly penetrated by the powerful new medium of television. The last chapter focuses briefly on the “afterlife” of the program; the most striking is the popular reconceptualization of the main character in the Soviet series about the fictional spy, Max von Stierlitz (the author uses phonetic spelling), handsome, intense, who is at present the butt of innumerable pithy jokes foregrounding his tendentious stupidity.

A singular find gives a glimpse into how the process of creation was subject to political oversight. The first episode of the Polish Stawka was criticized and replaced by an entirely new one. Comparing them, Amar finds that the depiction of degradation and persecution of Jews was cut from the first, now-scrapped episode and “references to the Holocaust were almost entirely removed” (21). Similarly, commenting on the East German Visor, the author writes, “…Visor was resolutely silent on the Holocaust. Foregrounding the legacies and dangers of Nazism, it stood squarely in the East German tradition of antifascism. It also illustrated this tradition’s greatest failure: the marginalization of the single most emblematic crime of Nazism” (143).

Discovering media effects on audiences during this time is difficult; Iosif Stalin’s banishment of sociology and opinion surveys had left sociologists dispersed in faculties of philosophy, economics, and historical materialism. Although Amar refers to polls, we have no precise information about methodology. Sociology and survey research were still held in opprobrium, sampling frames were not available, and randomness likely was missing, so that generalizing from numbers (usually given in percentages) would be risky. A second method of obtaining feedback was the analysis of letters to media institutions and television programs. Here, significance is weak: letters were often signed in the name of a group at a factory or written by superiors, then answered by the mass medium, which sent summaries to the Party hierarchy. Amar, while commenting that “letters cannot serve as a representative sample…among television viewers…” (24), nonetheless finds them useful as an echo of state policy. Given the low likelihood of dissent—instead of helpful criticism—in the published letters and doubts about the authenticity of letter-writers, such echoing is expected.

Amar’s research shows how tensions inherent in Soviet-era ideological tenets made for continuing and unsolvable friction between dualities. In the Soviet series, some writers wanted their hero to be seen in other countries as Bond was, but political pressure on program creators preferred the heroes to be continually tied to their own country. By avoiding the glaring issue of the time, Stalinism, the program undercut its potential impact and, in Amar’s words, “…remains as entangled as when it was made with evading an honest reckoning with Stalinism” (109). Fantasy, as deployed in the Bond movies, reached audiences with emotional resonance, but realism was the watchword of Soviet-era doctrine. Though these three series were popular in the three countries, they could also be tendentious. Imagination had to be grounded in the real, while evading honest grappling with viewers’ experiences of that reality. On a deeper level, flaws in the application of ideology meant that any media product sent to audiences was required, on the one hand, to inspire, persuade, and involve audiences, and on the other, to stick to ideology consonant by striving for a profound change in attitudes. Future and present were bound together but could not co-exist. Exposure to the message was valued; audience preferences that could lead the message astray were not seriously valued or systematically consulted. That made for a time of constant push and pull, a continuing effort of compromise, such that only the talent and drive of the programs’ creators could keep alive their acclaimed innovations.