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amielbjacobs · 5 months ago

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Shield and Sword Liveblog

Gonna try to copy my Shield and Sword liveblog here, off of Discord. Shield and Sword is a 1960s Soviet spy novel and TV show about a Soviet agent who goes undercover as a German intelligence officer named Johann Weiss during World War Two.

I watched the TV show and liked it, but I struggled to follow the plot - it's two long books in the original Russian, and the TV show is like eight hours of show, but it's still hard to pack all of that in, so a lot of explanatory stuff gets cut, and the subtitles didn't help - they weren't awful, but I wouldn't call them top tier either.

Then Monty of @fitz-higgins told me that there were canonically gay characters in the book, so I absolutely had to get a copy. I got an English translation by a guy named C.E. Bearne. I immediately found it a lot easier to parse the story in novel form, even though I still thought the translation was kind of lacking. I also found I really enjoyed it and that it moved along at a good pace where the show (as well as other Soviet thrillers) tended to lag.

Then I found out that was because C.E. Bearne cut a bunch of text out of the book in order to make two 500-page-ish books into one 400ish page book. So I started to follow along with a google-translated copy of the original Russian.

I'll start my liveblog here from the beginning, before I found out about the cuts. Tag will be "abj liveblogs" if you want to block that.

A guy got murdered by a poison ampoule shot from a gun? why would anyone do that

I think the young Latvian detective is cute, even if he is a collaborator with the Soviets (which we dont stan).

In the TV show, Johann keeps calling the Latvian detective "Mr. Investigator" and the investigator is like STOP CALLING ME THAT, I AM A WORKER JUST LIKE YOU

Lol, lmao, lol @ them being like "obviously the Soviets wouldn't suspect or persecute a worker." Do we think Vadim Kozhevnikov put that in there voluntarily, or do we think the censors made him do it?

I like that everyone thinks Johann is a snake. I mean he is, he's just a red snake not a brown snake. In the show he's also cold and reserved but we get SO little look into his inner character that it almost feels like he's not even a character, he's just a prop around which plot happens

This plot point is about a German citizen murdered in Soviet Latvia - the father of the protagonist's BFF, Heinrich. The local German agent is telling everyone that the father was killed by the NKVD to stop him/his son from going back to Germany - but of course, the reader instantly suspects that he was in fact killed by the Germans to force the son back to Germany. It is not a subtle plot twist.

The Nazis are soooo antisemitic in Shield and Sword, which is striking to me because in the most famous Soviet WWII spy film, Seventeen Moments of Spring, antisemitism is barely mentioned. All the focus is on how the Nazis hate Russians, the fact that there might be another group of people they also want to genocide is like - I'm not even sure you could glean that the Nazis are antisemitic from Seventeen Moments if you didn't already know that.

This is particularly interesting because the author of Seventeen Moments had a Jewish father, and the director of the Seventeen Moments book was Jewish herself. But both the author and director of Shield and Sword are gentile. So that makes me wonder, was it just a difference in focus, or did the creators of Seventeen Moments feel they were less free to depict anti-semitism because they also experienced it? Was it, perhaps, fine to talk about anti-semitism, as long as you weren't a Jew? Or was this just the result of some individual peculiarity of the creators?

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😭 Johann is going to Germany because the son (Heinrich) is going because "you are the only human being close to me." Cute . . . I get why everyone ships these two.

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I like how early this story starts - Seventeen Moments starts with the Soviet protagonist already embedded in the upper echelons of Nazi society, whereas this story shows us in painstaking detail how the protagonist gets into Nazi Germany and climbs his way up the ladder. Very interesting stuff.

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JFKSJDFH all the other factory workers think he's a Gestapo spy . . . close but no cigar.

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Sad little man.

This is the Gestapo man who Weiss is hoping to flatter as a route to get influence in Nazi Germany.

Gestapo guy: [while being dragged limp and drunk into bed, slurring his words] I hope to make a career on Jews.

I'm actually glad they put that in there, I do feel like these Soviet films have a tendency to erase Jewish suffering

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At this point in the liveblog, where Johann gets taken under the wing of his landlady and given her dead son's discarded clothes, I have written:

embarrassing stuff.

I like this, tho I am confused how he magically knew the sad pole needed help hiding from the Germans. In retrospect, this might be something I'd find out if I checked the original russian version - a lot of the things that confused me on first pass have turned out to be due to cuts made either by the show director or the British translator.

Aaaaaaand . . . just spent like 10 minutes looking for this bit in the original Russian. Nope! Doesn't make any sense there either. Ah well. We can't have everything.

I find it fascinating how it's only in these older spy novels that a male spy is ever shown being afraid of having to put out for a woman to get the mission done

It kind of seems like a bit of a step back in that one respect

LESBIANS????

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Poor Johann, gonna call him J cause I'm on my phone, he is terrified because he knows the Germans are gonna invade ussr and he can't get a message out to warn anyone

Oh Johann. Stalin wouldn't believe you even if you did

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there's a short wallace-y looking guy whose claim to fame is that he seduced one of the women officers to let him get in and out of the barracks whenever he wants short king also his life was saved by a - I think Jewish - doctor so he let the guy hide in a barrel "at the time of the massacres" idk fully what that means, is the short king anti-Nazi, did he just make an exception, was he massacring Jews I think not because "in the barrels" - he was a brewer, so like, he's letting this Jewish guy hide in his business, before he joined the Nazi party I really like that this show has decided to show Nazi Germany as absolutely full of good-hearted civilians willing to aid the communist war effort is it accurate? no is it waaaaayyyyyy less painful than having to sit through five thousand scenes of indistinguishably vile Nazis going on and on like in every other Soviet spy film? YES, A HUNDRED TIMES YES I love that this short chubby guy apparently goes through life getting everything he wants by seducing women

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Johann got caught drawing a sketch of an important German spy and now he has to pretend to be rly into art

He drew a bunch of pictures of the people around him and also of various nazi personages, Hitler, etc

There was fanfic of these two on Ao3. On the first read of the translation I wasn't sure if this character was or wasn't queer-coded . . . but it turns out that's because of the damn British translators. It's much more explicit in the original Russian. Here's Google Translate:

Oskar von Dietrich had never known such sorrows, but he had nonetheless experienced some. In his youthful maturity he had suffered from a painful shyness towards women, and when he tried to overcome it he found himself powerless. The girl with whom he had an affair had blabbed about his shortcoming, and Dietrich had long been haunted by the mocking pity of his peers. At the military school he became a follower of the ancient patrician depraved morals and found a patron in the person of the fencing instructor, who forced the cadets to treat Oskar with respect. However, this was not particularly difficult, because bad inclinations were common in the closed educational institutions of Germany.

This queer character is, of course, a villain and a Nazi, but I also feel pretty bad for him. More Google Translate:

Somehow Oskar's father, a distinguished officer of the Reichswehr and former adjutant of the Kaiser, found out about the intimate friendship with the teacher. A difficult conversation took place between father and son, during which the son dared to hint that the Kaiser himself had the same inclinations as his adored fencing teacher. It all ended with the father refusing his son a monthly pension. In order not to be subjected to deprivation, Oskar stole some of his mother's family jewels. And although his act was not made public, Oskar, who loved his mother, long experienced his humiliation, seeing her now always frightened, sad face. There was another incident in the life of Oskar von Dietrich, the memory of which even now, many years later, made him blush. Once a pretty little white goat wandered into the open camp firing range where the cadets were training. Delighted by the entertainment, the cadets opened fire on it indiscriminately. The wounded goat first rushed about with pitiful cries, and then crawled, dragging its broken hind legs. The cadets crowded around and watched its agony with curiosity. And then Oskar could not bear it any longer - he burst into tears. It was obscene.

At the officers' council of the school, Oskar had to listen to just reproaches that he had disgraced the school, that his outrageous behavior, unworthy of a future officer, had made the most painful impression on the cadets. They even said that he should be expelled from the school. The father was summoned; and if during the discussion of the not very decent friendship with the fencing teacher the father had only smiled ironically, and then deprived Oskar of his pension, saying that a cadet who did not pay the girls on Alexanderplatz could live more economically, now Colonel von Dietrich was screaming furiously at his son, convulsively grabbing him by the lapels of his uniform with his veiny, flabby fingers and even trying to slap him. In the end, Oscar repented and everything turned out okay.

There's a lot to unpack here, right? I think we're definitely meant to be disgusted with Oscar for being gay, but there's also this thing going on where, like. His father hated him for being not masculine enough, exemplified both by his homosexuality and by his pity for the goat. And his unmanliness in bursting into tears and in being gay, those are conflated here - by both the characters and the author, I think.

But we're surely supposed to be on Oscar's side when it comes to the goat story, right? We're meant to think that this was a display of humanity and empathy from this young boy, which was then beaten out of him as "unmasculine," which is part of what turned him into the Nazi monster he is now. So there is the idea here, that at least some of Oscar's perceived unmanliness is a good thing, for which he is unfairly persecuted by society. I feel like that creates a tiny bit of ambiguity here on how the narrative perceives queerness.

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this is 100% the best depiction of Nazi Germany I've ever seen in a Soviet film and by best I mostly mean that I am not suffering every moment a German character is on screen but also this show REALLY doesn't shy away from depicting Nazi anti-semitism which I think is kind of based for a Russian show There's a Charlie Chaplin impersonator performing for the Nazis in a club (?) and they're all shouting JEW at him and throwing things at him and laughing about it, which possibly means he will live IDK if that means that the performer is supposed to be actually Jewish, I thought they were calling Charlie CHaplin Jewish but then I googled it and no, Chaplin was Romani, not Jewish I mean not very Romani Oh but people thought he was so I guess that's it and apparently Chaplin thought that was based

This is like, the most queer-coded thing Dietrichs does in the English translation, even tho in the original Russian it's stated pretty baldly that he's gay.

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Johann sent word ahead that the Germans were going to invade the USSR and now he's like hey why did the USSR not do fuck all with that info that I risked my life for!!!!!

This is historically accurate - Soviet spies DID report to the USSR that Nazi Germany was going to invade, and the USSR simply refused to listen. I'm surprised they were allowed to include that in a book about it, tho. But I guess the 60s were a different time.

This is funny but also kind of sad. Dietrichs is a monster and a clown but it's also like, desperately sad, to a modern reader, that he's sitting there drunk with this straight guy he definitely has a crush on and fantasizing about killing everyone in the entire world, because that is the only scenario where he can imagine it being okay to be gay. Really sad.

#abj liveblogs #Щит и меч #the shield and the sword #shield and sword fans come find me . . . im going to be SO autistic about this book

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