Maxim Kammerer
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Maxim Kammerer is a fictional character in Strugatsky brothers' series of science fiction novels about the 23rd century (Russian fans tend to refer to it as Noon Universe).
He starts out as an adventurer and space explorer, becoming involved in the politics of an alien civilization of Saraksh and overthrowing the totalitarian regime of one of its states, and later becomes a prominent official in the COMCON-2, "Commitee for Contacts", which is a type of intelligence and security service, thinly modeled after the Soviet KGB. His career thereafter focuses on studying the Wanderers, an alien civilization that has left traces on many of the planets known to humans (e.g. a huge underground city on an uninhabited planet or the remnants of a humanoid civilization that told humans that the vast majority of their population have been voluntarily removed to an unknown place at a time of a global ecological catastrophe.) While gathering little meaningful information about intentions, history, or potential threat of the Wanderers to the human civilization, Kammerer eventually presided, as the head of the COMCON-2, over the Great Revelation involving the discovery of the Ludens (людены), a subgroup of humans capable of superhuman intelligence after a medical procedure.
Kammerer appears in "Inhabited Island", "Beetle in an Anthill" and "The Time Wanderers". He was briefly mentioned in "Little One" and "Guy from the Purgatory".
Originally, Strugatsky brothers dubbed Maxim "Maxim Rostislavskiy". However, the Soviet censors demanded that Maxim's last name would be changed to something more Germanic (this was part of the censor's efforts to stear the novel away from it's originally anti-Soviet undertones). When Strugatky brothers got an opportunity to reverse the changes brought on by Soviet censors, they chose to retain the "Kammerer" last name. They felt that changing it back to the original would create a continuity problem for other Noon Universe stories where Maxim went by his altered last name.