"Even before I graduated from school, I wanted to work in intelligence," Putin writes in his autobiography, First Person. "Books and spy movies like The Sword and the Shield took hold of my imagination."
The Nazi espionage thriller, based on a novel by Vadim Kozhevnikov, tells the story of a heroic Soviet double agent who infiltrates the German SS during World War II. The four-part movie was highly influential in the Soviet Union, even inspiring 15-year-old Vladimir Putin to march straight into the local KGB office to sign up. Back then, the bleak office tower was known to locals as the 'Big House'.
''It wasn't just a whim,'' Putin recalled in a 2000 interview. ''I even went to the building that housed the KGB. In other words, I was thinking about it in real terms.''
It was a tumultuous period in history. Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces swept Czechoslovakia to crack down on reformist trends in Prague in the late 1960s. Students in the West were challenging authority with street protests. In The Sword and the Shield, Putin found his true calling: "I had made my choice. I wanted to be a spy."
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"Even before I graduated from school, I wanted to work in intelligence," Putin writes in his autobiography, First Person. "Books and spy movies like The Sword and the Shield took hold of my imagination."
The Nazi espionage thriller, based on a novel by Vadim Kozhevnikov, tells the story of a heroic Soviet double agent who infiltrates the German SS during World War II. The four-part movie was highly influential in the Soviet Union, even inspiring 15-year-old Vladimir Putin to march straight into the local KGB office to sign up. Back then, the bleak office tower was known to locals as the 'Big House'.
''It wasn't just a whim,'' Putin recalled in a 2000 interview. ''I even went to the building that housed the KGB. In other words, I was thinking about it in real terms.''
It was a tumultuous period in history. Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces swept Czechoslovakia to crack down on reformist trends in Prague in the late 1960s. Students in the West were challenging authority with street protests. In The Sword and the Shield, Putin found his true calling: "I had made my choice. I wanted to be a spy."
The Sword and the Shield is set in 1940 with Nazi Germany at the height of its military power. The Germans have captured most of Europe and are eyeing the Soviet Union. The Soviet military command arranges for its spies to infiltrate the ranks of the German military and the SS. Soviet spy Alexander Belov (Lyubshin) travels from Soviet-held Latvia to Nazi Germany under an assumed name. His goal is to use his fluent German to manipulate others and ascend the ladder of the Abwehr, the German military-intelligence service for the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht, and later the SD, the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party.
Putin also become fluent in German and served as a KGB officer in East Berlin in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, a pivotal event in world history that figuratively marked the fall of the Iron Curtain and communism in Central and Eastern Europe.
Based on the novel by Vadim Kozhevnikov, The Sword and the Shield refers to the emblem of the Soviet NKVD, the secret police and forerunner of the KGB. It is generally assumed that KGB Colonel Rudolf Abel - played by actor Mark Rylance in Bridge of Spies- provided the prototype for Kozhevnikoff’s hero, Alexander Boloff, whose surname is a transposition of Abel in Russian, according to Who’s Who in Spy Fiction.
Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew would later adopt the same title for The Mitrokhin Archive, their secret history of the KGB spy agency which excelled in assassination, poison, and of course espionage.
When 10 Russian agents were traded in a spy swap in 2010 - including glamorous spy Anna Chapman - Putin revealed that he met the group and they sang patriotic Soviet songs. “We sang From Where the Motherland Begins,” Putin said, referring to the Soviet song made famous in The Sword and the Shield.
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