Soviet movies about Russia

Russian general have to find and bring back to St. Petersburg girl claiming her right to the throne...

A Russian agent is sent to a mission in Chile as a punishment. While there, he continues his adventures in a massage parlor where he meets Paola - a young prostitute he falls in love with.

The 1975 film by Georgi Daneliya "Afonya" was an unexpected commercial hit in USSR. The main character "Afonya" Borshev is a plumber, who spends his life partying with "buddies", many of whom he doesn't even remember after nights of heavy drinking. His wife leaves him, his boss places him on probation, his whole life is falling apart, but he doesn't realize it. Afonya met Katya at a dance club, yet didn't pay her much attention. But she is the one, who can save him... In this movie Daneliya achieves a perfect balance of satire and drama. Quotes from the movie gained a cult status in USSR.

A romantic and funny fantasy about the events occurred during the building of a first railroad in Russia.

In this comic but dated story, nerdy Shurik travels to Caucas in search of native legends and folklore. But what he finds is a beautiful girl whom, due to intoxication and deceit of the local "gang", he ends up literally stealing for the local deceitful governor. All the time Shurik thinks that it is all just a one old Caucasian custom. When he, finally, realizes what he did he goes out in search for the girl of his dreams. Written by Ptah Hoteb

The Soviet-Hungarian film version of the biography of one of the most talented composers of our time, the classic of the Vienna operetta - Imre Kálmán, known for all his music for operettas "The Csárdás Princess", "Countess Maritza", "The Circus Princess", "The Violet of Montmartre", "Die Bajadere" and many others. The music of Imre Kálmán has no equal in operetta for its festivity, “elegance”, and the refinement of melodics and orchestration.

Anatoli Yefremovich Novoseltsev works in a statistics institution, whose director is an unattractive and bossy woman. An old friend of his, Yuri Grigorievich Samokhvalov, who gets appointed assistant director of the institution, wants to make Novoseltsev the head of the department but encounters objections from Ludmila Prokopievna Kalugina, the director. Samokhvalov then advises Novoseltsev to lightly hit on the boss. Ironically, Novoseltsev and Kalugina fall in love with each other...

An engineer in charge of the production line of a factory in Moscow is sent to a small town to try to specify the distributor the new dimensions of a mechanic part they need. But in this town everybody seems to be crazy (a secretary who works naked, a group of people take the engineer as a rock & roll player, etc) and, in addition, this man is witness of a suicide, so he is trapped inside the town.

A man travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention.

A music student is expeled from school because he loves jazz, a kind of music that represents the US capitalism. He hires two street musicians to form a dixie band, and goes from one city to another trying to gain fame.

During World War II, оld Georgian peasant wine-grower Georgy (Sergo Zakariadze) leaves his Georgian village and goes off to the front line, hoping to find his son. George should see and transfer a lot of things, he becomes a soldier and only in the last days of war finds the son...

A former aristocrat Ippolit Vorobyaninov leads a miserable life in Soviet Russia. His mother-in-law reveals a secret to him - she hid family diamonds in one of the twelve chairs they once had. Vorobyaninov in cooperation with a young con artist Ostap Bender start a long search for the diamonds.

A Russian poet and his interpreter travel to Italy to research the life of an 18th-century composer.

A talented girl from the provincial Russian town Pasha Stroganova dreams of becoming an actress. She plays the role of Baba Yaga in the amateur theatre — and does it so organically that the visiting filmmaker offers her the most difficult role in the historical drama about Joan of Arc. She was given not only great acting talent, but the talent of deep, selfless love. A dream comes true: she is invited to the main role, and she begins a completely different life, full of real creative torment, insights and true happiness.

The families of 18 soldiers who heroically died in 1944 are meeting at the place of the squad last battle.

The film is based on the eponymous book, written by two former street gangsters - Grigori Belykh and Leonid Panteleyev. Film is set in the 1920s St. Petersburg, Russia. Streets of the city are full of the homeless boys. They are caught to be raised and educated at the correction school named after Dostoevsky. The boys are street smart and difficult. But the faculty stands up to the challenge. The teaches are being devoted and caring, and gradually win the respect of the most difficult kids. The school director Vicknixor is a refined intellectual, who becomes a role model for the boys.

In Italy, a dying woman tells her granddaughter that she hid her treasure many years ago in Russia, in the city of Leningrad. Other people (who were around when she died) also learn about it. Thus several people arrive in Leningrad trying to find the treasure, each one for himself/herself. What's worse - the only information they have is that the treasure is under a lion - and it's in Leningrad, a city known by its numerous statues of lions. The story gets even more interesting when the soviet militia (police) learns about the whole thing and send an undercover agent...

Shown a life in the remote siberian village. Vasia, who never leave his family, village, comes to pass summer holiday on the Black Sea. New world, new people - so, hi's temted by a half-crazy woman (Raisa Zaharovna). And after short time Vasia returns to his wife and children.

Once upon a time there lived a Tsar named Yeremey who went on a year-long journey to take inventory of all he owned. One day he is kidnapped by the underwater Tsar Chudo-Yudo. When a ransom is demanded, the Tsar's family is faced with all kinds of intrigue and treachery.

Andrey Pavlovich Buzykin, who makes a living by teaching at an institute and translating English literature, is cheating on his wife. Buzykin's main problem is that he's a kind man with a weak character. The lies he is telling his wife all the time are inconvincing, but he never has the courage to tell her the truth. His lover, Alla, is aware of his family life, but gets offended when, for example, he cannot meet her so that he doesn't come home late, or when he doesn't want to go home in a new jacket she gives him to avoid having to explain to his wife. Alla and Nina, Andrei's wife, both leave him, forgive him, and return to him at the same time, and Andrei continues with this kind of life, full of suffering and deceit. Finally, both women are so fed up with his lies that they don't believe him even when he is telling the truth...

Following the Russian Civil War, a loyal Red, Shilov, must prove he is at home among strangers as he attempts to recapture a shipment of gold that he was supposed to deliver to Moscow. Needed as a means of buying food for the people, the gold Shilov was entrusted with is stolen, initially by a group of assassins and then by a group of bandits. In tracking the gold’s whereabouts, Shilov’s motives are questioned and he is suspected of treason, in part because his brother was a devoted White. In an effort to clear his name, Shilov locates the gold, but he also discovers rampant greed and corruption.

At the end of World War II, Giovanna, a war bride living near Milan refuses to accept that her husband, Antonio, missing on the Russian front, is dead. There's a flashback to their brief courtship near her hometown of Naples, his 12-day leave to marry her, ruses to keep from deployment, and the ultimate farewell. Some years after the war, still with no word from Antonio, Giovanna goes to Russia to find him, starting in the town near the winter battle when he disappeared. Armed with his photograph, what will she find?

ASSA is set in Crimea during the winter in the mid eighties. A young musician (Bananan) falls for mobster's (Krymov) young mistress (Alika). The parallel story line involves an 18th century assassination plot.

A twelve years old girl Lena who has come to live with her grandfather in a small Russian town is being bullied by her classmates. She took the rap of being a class traitor because she was in love with the boy who had betrayed his classmates when they were bunking off and going to cinema instead of a literature lesson. The class is penalized for that, not being allowed to go to Moscow for fall holidays with the rest of the school. Lena is being ostracized, "boycotted" however not telling the truth, waiting that the boy himself would confess to be guilty.

The invasion of a village in Byelorussia by German forces sends young Florya into the forest to join the weary Resistance fighters, against his family's wishes. There he meets a girl, Glasha, who accompanies him back to his village. On returning home, Florya finds his family and fellow peasants massacred. His continued survival amidst the brutal debris of war becomes increasingly nightmarish, a battle between despair and hope.

A man, who becomes mistaken for his brother who was immigrating to Israel from USSR, finds himself caught up in the middle of a bureaucratic mess when he realizes that if he tells the truth about who he is, he will go to jail and his brother's family will never be allowed to leave the USSR. He therefore assumes his brother's identity to get to Israel hoping his distant uncle living there will help him out. The plan backfires, however, when he realizes that the uncle is a paranoid lunatic thinking the KGB is out to get him. He becomes stranded in Israel with no friends, no money, and no passport, trying to figure out a way to get back home.

"I Am Walking Along Moscow" aka "Ya Shagayu Po Moskve" (1963) is a charming lyrical comedy directed by Georgi Daneliya in 1963 that was nominated for Golden Palm at Cannes Film Festival. Daneliya proved that it is possible to create a masterpiece in the most difficult genre of romantic comedy. Made by the team of young and incredibly talented artists that besides Daneliya included writer/poet Gennady Shpalikov, composer Andrei Petrov, and cinematographer Vadim Yusov (who had made four films with Andrei Tarkovski), and the dream cast of the talented actors even in the smaller cameos, "I Am Walking Along Moscow" keeps walking victoriously through the decades remaining deservingly one of the best and most beloved Russian comedies and simply one of the best Russian movies ever made. Funny and gentle, dreamy and humorous, romantic and realistic, the film is blessed with the eternal youth and will always take to the walk on the streets of Moscow new generations of the grateful viewers.

Nadya Klyueva is a single woman. Persuaded by her friend, she decides to charm her co-worker whom she doesn't really love, but who is the most popular man around.

A young priest is ordered to preside over the wake of a witch in the church of a remote village. This means spending three nights alone with the corpse with only his faith to protect him.

A new doctor from Moscow arrives at a provincial mental institution. His interest is the peculiarities of the psyche of a patient who believes that he is Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated the last Russian tsar. In the course of their conversations it transpires that the patient is a kind of philosopher, not without a gift for suggestion. In a while the doctor himself falls under his patient’s influence: he tends to relive that fatal night of June 16-17, 1918 when, without any investigation or trial, Tsar Nicholas II, who had recently abdicated, was murdered, together with his wife, daughters and incurably ill heir. Soon the doctor realizes that the tragedy of the last Russian tsar is in part his own tragedy, too...

A military explorer meets and befriends a Goldi man in Russia’s unmapped forests. A deep and abiding bond evolves between the two men, one civilized in the usual sense, the other at home in the glacial Siberian woods.

The true story of Ivan Sanchin, the KGB officer who was Stalin's private film projectionist from 1939 until the dictator's death. Told from Sanchin's view, the sympathetic but tragically flawed hero maintains unwavering faith in his "Master" despite the arrest of his neighbors and his involvement with their daughter, his wife's affair with the chilling State Security chief Lavrentii Beria and her tragic decline, and the deadly political machinations within the Kremlin he witnesses firsthand. Written by Martin H. Booda

Poetic journey through the shards and shadows of one boy's war-ravaged youth.

A kindergarten director Troshkin is a dead ringer for a criminal nicknamed "Docent" who stole the priceless...

Three stories based on O. Henry novels.

During World War II, earnest young Russian soldier Alyosha Skvortsov is rewarded with a short leave of absence for performing a heroic deed on the battlefield. Feeling homesick, he decides to visit his mother. Due to his kindhearted nature, however, Alyosha is repeatedly sidetracked by his efforts to help those he encounters, including a lovely girl named Shura. In his tour of a country devastated by war, he struggles to keep hope alive.

On the eve of his fortieth anniversary Sergei Makarov looks back at his life and learns that he has achieved nothing. He was not able to be happy and to bring happiness to the closest people in his life, neither to his long-suffering wife nor young mistress nor friends nor work... It is about the men who never grew up and could not find themselves in the time of stagnation – gifted, charming, but infantile and lost, they never were able to realize themselves...

The film tells about the fighting everyday life of the crew of self-propelled guns during the liberation of Right-Bank Ukraine. Junior Lieutenant Maleshkin, an unshooted graduate of the school, commands the crew of the self-propelled gun SU-100. All the subordinates of Maleshkin are older than him and much more experienced. The authority of the young commander is tested at every step, he quarrels, then reconciles with his crew. In addition, Maleshkin is very dissatisfied with the battery commander, he now and then threatens to remove the sluggish young officer from the command. In the crew of Maleshkin, various troubles constantly occur: either the driver will catch the commandant’s eyes in an untidy, grimy look, then a combat grenade with a dropped check will be discovered in the car, or a breakdown will occur just at the moment the regiment enters the march.

Ivan is old Russia: thick, dour, hard-working, often brutish; he misses Communism. He drives a taxi and one night meets Alexi, a new Russian, a musician, an alcoholic, irresponsible. Alexi stiffs Ivan for the fare, so Ivan tracks him down and a love-hate relationship ensues. When Alexi lets the bath water run over in Ivan's flat and Ivan must pay 500 rubles for repairs, he tries to force Alexi into day labor to repay him. It's hopeless. Then, suddenly, Alexi is discovered, goes on a jazz tour of America, becomes a celebrity, and returns in triumph. Ivan longs to renew the friendship, and it looks as if he may get what he wants.

A young girl decides to join a Husar squadron and fight against Napoleon. Dressed as a man she has a hard time adjusting to the rude Husar life styles.

A fairy tale about a conceited young man and a young woman with a tyrannical step-mother, who must overcome magical trials in order to be together.

The story of a man (Andrey Sokolov) whose life was ruthlessly crippled by World War II. His wife and daughters were killed during the bombing of his village, he spent some time as a prisoner, and his only son was killed in action only a few days before the victory...

In 1919, Hungarian Communists aid the Bolsheviks' defeat of Czarists, the Whites. Near the Volga, a monastery and a field hospital are held by one side then the other.

Torn by personal guilt Italian General Umberto Nobile reminisces about his 1928 failed Arctic expedition aboard the airship Italia.

Semyon Gorbunkov goes on a cruise with a smuggler on board. In Istanbul, he slips and breaks his arm. What he didn't know is that this was a signal for the gang of smugglers.

Existential drama taking place in the midst of Perestroika.