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Semnadtsat mgnoveniy vesny (1973)
A 1973 Soviet television mini-series.
The series was immensely popular in the Soviet Union, and during its first showing, city streets would empty. It attracted greater audiences than hockey matches and crime rates dropped significantly during the broadcasts. Leonid Brezhnev was a devoted fan. The character of Stirlitz became the Soviet James Bond.
In early 1945, while Adolf Hitler (Fritz Diez) is determined to continue the war, Walter Schellenberg (Oleg Tabakov), his head of foreign intelligence, has convinced Heinrich Himmler (Nikolai Propkovich) to conduct secret negotiations with the Americans, aimed at forging a separate peace between Germany and the Western Allies, which would allow the Germans to concentrate all their forces on the Eastern Front. Maksim Isaev (Vyacheslav Tikhonov), a Soviet spy who has infiltrated the Nazi Party in Germany under the name Stirlitz, is tasked with disrupting the negotiations between the German general Karl Wolff (Vasily Lanovoy) and the American diplomat Allen Dulles (Vyacheslav Shalevich) taking place in Switzerland. He is ordered by Moscow to ascertain whether the Americans and the Germans have a secret channel of communication, and if so - to obstruct it.
He recruits two aides - Professor Pleischner (Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev), a former member of the German Resistance, and Pastor Schlag, (Rostislav Plyatt) a clergyman who disapproves of the regime.
Stirlitz succeeds in leaking the details of the negotiations both to Hitler and to Stalin (Andro Kobaladze). The Soviets, now possessing evidence, demand an end to those contacts and President Roosevelt obliges them. Himmler narrowly convinces Hitler it was all merely an attempt to sow distrust between the Allies.
Wings (1977)
Royal Flying Corps (RFC) dramas series set in World War I
Wings is a drama series about the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) in World War I that ran on BBC television from 1977 to 1978. The series covers the activities of an RFC flight in France and their relatives and friends back in 'Blighty'. Twenty-five episodes were made in all.
It features a young working class blacksmith, Alan Farmer (Tim Woodward) turned fighter pilot, who forms an unlikely friendship with another pilot Charles Gaylion (Michael Cochrane), an upper-class Old Etonian, son of a general, a snob who doesn't believe in social mobility. Gaylion becomes incandescent when he discovers Farmer has been dating his sister Kate (Julia Carey) but sees nothing wrong with dating Farmer's fiancée Lorna Collins (Sarah Porter), a farmer's daughter, while Farmer is missing in France, presumed dead.
Their flight commander is the volatile Captain Triggers (Nicholas Jones). His flight's aircraft carry a pilot and an observer, mostly flying reconnaissance missions, but sometimes acting as spotters for artillery on the ground.
The British pilots are struggling with aeroplanes, such as Bristol Boxkites for flying training and Avro 504s for sorties, which are both unreliable and inferior to the German machines, particularly a new Fokker monoplane (Eindecker). The airmen must also face the resentment of British soldiers enduring the horrors of trench warfare, who see them as having a safe and easy life, sleeping in beds at bases far away from the front line.
In the early days of the war the pilots on both sides fly without parachutes and fire at each other with rifles and revolvers, often waving at their enemies. The British thought at the time that if a pilot had a parachute he would jump from the plane when hit rather than try to save the aircraft. By 1918 some German aircraft were equipped with parachutes, although these were dangerous and often got snagged in spinning planes. The series explains the transition to the fitting of weaponry to British biplanes. Lacking the Germans' interruptor gear, they had to be fired at an angle rather than through the propellers.
Farmer is eventually commissioned because he is the only non-commissioned pilot left in his flight. Thereafter he faces resentment from some officers because of his background and from some rank and file because they feel that as a working class man he belongs with them.
TASS upolnomochen zayavit... (1984)
Soviet Spy Thriller
A Soviet spy thriller in the best tradition of international spy fiction, TASS is Authorized to Declare is a 1984 Soviet ten-part television mini-series, based on the novel of the same title by Yulian Semyonov. It reverses the ideological balance of the novels of John Le Carré, Frederick Forsyth and other masters of the genre.
The conflict centres on the small African state of Nagonia, newly liberated from colonialism and under Soviet protection, which awaits an invasion (Operation Torch) from the 'contra' forces of Gen. Mario Ogano (Kalifa Konde), backed by both the CIA and the Chinese government. The invasion army, led by German Nazi mercenaries, is training in the jungle and preventing essential supplies reaching Nagonia. There has recently been an explosion on a Soviet cargo ship bound for neighbouring Lewisburg with a cargo of agricultural equipment, lorries and medical supplies, causing a fire and killing three crew. The CIA are believed responsible for this.
In Lewisburg, American commercial interests, working through under-cover CIA agents, and businessman John Glebb (Vakhtang Kikabidze), are warily in contact with field officer Slavin (Yuri Solomin), whom the KGB have sent to investigate the situation and find a way to prevent the invasion.
Coded radio messages fly to and fro between Moscow and Lewisburg, Washington and the clandestine receiving post of a CIA mole (Trianon) in the Russian capital. Trianon can advise the CIA of likely Soviet responses to American actions. Tension mounts as those with secret knowledge are killed or disappear. At the Moscow centre intelligence agents under General Konstantinov (Vyacheslav Tikhonov) of the KGB work against the clock trying to unravel contradictory evidence and secret codes.
When the mole is finally uncovered and a CIA officer under diplomatic cover is caught engaging in espionage red-handed, the US ambassador is summoned to the Soviet foreign ministry in Moscow and confronted with the evidence. He agrees to have Operation Torch called off in return for silence on the part of the Soviets.
Izvestiya is later able to report: "TASS is authorised to declare that Soviet counter-intelligence has uncovered and neutralised a CIA operation aimed against the USSR and Nagonia."