Best movies like Chapayev
A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like Chapayev Starring Boris Babochkin, Leonid Kmit, Varvara Myasnikova, Boris Blinov, and more. If you liked Chapayev then you may also like: Zangezur, Wedding in Malinovka, The White Sun of the Desert, Nicholas and Alexandra, October (Ten Days that Shook the World) and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.
This film is based on the book about Vasili Ivanovich Chapaev (1887 - 1919) who was in real life the Commander of the 25th Division of the Red Army. Chapaev is an uneducated peasant and a decorated hero in the World War I and later in the Russian Civil War, that followed the Russian revolution. This man of action is fighting on the side of the poor people. His troops consist of peasants, just like him. Unable to write, he can brilliantly demonstrate various battle tactics by moving potatoes on the table. He is street smart. He never lost a battle against the experienced Generals of the Tzar's Army.
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Wedding in Malinovka
The movie takes place during Russia's civil war between the Reds (Bolsheviks) and the Whites (Mensheviks). Andrejka and Yarinka are a young betrothed couple in the village of Malinovka, caught between the battle lines. Gritsian is the leader of a Menshevik band who are planning to attack the village. Yarinka appeals to the local Bolshevik commander for his faction's help. The Bolsheviks quickly come up with a plan to save the village... but the plan requires Yarinka to enter into a pretend marriage with Gritsian.
The White Sun of the Desert
The setting is the east shore of the Caspian Sea (today's Turkmenistan) where the Red Army soldier Fyodor Sukhov has been fighting the Civil War in Russian Asia for a number of years. After being hospitalised and then demobbed, he sets off home to join his wife, only to be caught up in a desert fight between a Red Army cavalry unit and Basmachi guerrillas. The cavalry unit commander, Rahimov, "convinces" Sukhov to help, temporarily, with the protection of abandoned women of the Basmachi guerrilla leader Abdullah's harem. Leaving a young Red Army soldier, Petrukha, to assist Sukhov with the task, Rahimov and his cavalry unit set out to pursue fleeing Abdullah.Sukhov and women from Abdullah's harem return to a nearby shore town. Soon, looking for a seaway across the border, Abdullah and his gang come to the same town...
Nicholas and Alexandra
Tsar Nicholas II, the inept last monarch of Russia, insensitive to the needs of his people, is overthrown and exiled to Siberia with his family.
October (Ten Days that Shook the World)
Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution.
The Red and the White
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 and then the other.
The Commissar
Klavdia Vavilova, a Red Army cavalry commissar, is waylaid by an unexpected pregnancy. She stays with a Jewish family to give birth and is softened somewhat by the experience of family life.
If War Comes Tomorrow
The propaganda documentary about the readiness of the Red Army to repulse any enemy is based on documentary shots taken during the real maneuvers of the Red Army. Armadas of tanks, immense columns of infantry, dozens of fighters and bombers, thousands of cavalry, legendary divisions of the Civil War. The film glorifies Soviet military power and shows the Soviet people what the war will be like when the imperialists attack the USSR — quick, victorious, almost bloodless.
Mockery
There is hunger in Siberia during the Russian Civil War. One day while dim-witted peasant Sergei is searching corpses for food, he meets a young woman looking for the town of Novokursk. She asks Sergei to help her get there, and to tell anyone they might meet that he is her husband.
Storm Over Asia
In 1918 a young and simple Mongol herdsman and trapper is cheated out of a valuable fox fur by a European capitalist fur trader. Ostracized from the trading post, he escapes to the hills after brawling with the trader who cheated him. In 1920 he becomes a Soviet partisan, and helps the partisans fight for the Soviets against the occupying British army. However he is captured by the British when they try to requisition cattle from the herdsmen at the same time as the commandant meets with a reincarnated Grand Lama. After the trapper is shot, the army discovers an amulet that suggests he is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. They find him still alive, so the army restores his health and plans to use him as the head of a puppet regime. The trapper is thus thrust into prominence as he is placed in charge of the puppet government. By the end, however, the "puppet" turns against his masters in an outburst of fury.
The Alive and the Dead
A Russian war correspondent is drafted into the war and finds himself in the middle of battle. When he loses his party card, however, he is treated as a deserter until he finds help from a kind man. This Soviet war feature was considerably outspoken for the time as it addressed issues such as anti-Stalinism, Siberia and the inhumanity of war. Adapting his screenplay from a book by Constantin Simonov, Alexandre Stolper was responsible for writing as well as directing.
Shors
The year is 1919. German troops retreat from Ukraine. The Directory, the Ukrainian national government lead by Symon Petliura, takes control of Kyiv. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik division commanded by Mykola Shchors is marching on the capital. The Bolsheviks capture the cities of Vinnytsia, Zhmerynka, and others one by one, but lose Berdychiv to Petliura’s forces. They are demoralized by the defeat. By his personal example of courage and military skill, Shchors inspires the retreating Red troops and leads them to victory over the enemy.
A Slave of Love
Olga Voznesenskaya is a silent screen star whose pictures are so popular that underground revolutionaries risk capture to see them. She's in southern Russia filming a tear-jerker as the Bolsheviks get closer to Moscow. Although married, she spends time every day with Victor Pototsky, the film's cameraman. Gradually, it comes to light that Victor uses his job as a cover for filming White atrocities and Red heroism: he's a Bolshevik. He asks her for help, and she discovers meaning in her otherwise flighty and self-centred life. Love blooms. Will the Red forces arrive in time to save them from a suspicious White military leader? Will she find courage?
Two Comrades Were Serving
Set during the last days of the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. The Crimea Peninsula is the last stronghold of the White Guard, and the Red Army is planning the final assault. The first story line of the movie follows two Red Army soldiers: unlikely friends Nekrasov and Karyakin. The second story line is about a White Guard officer Brusentsov who is devoted to Russia and his cause but sees it being destroyed day by day.
The Sky Slow-Mover
Three pilots are best friends and good fighters. During the WWII they are taking an oath to refrain from love until the end of the War. But soon they meet three women-pilots. One by one they give up the oath, and all three fall in love.
They Fought for Their Motherland
In July 1942, in the Second World War, the rearguard of the Russian army protects the bridgehead of the Don River against the German army while the retreating Russian troops cross the bridge. While they move back to the Russian territory through the countryside, the soldiers show their companionship, sentiments, fears and heroism to defend their motherland.
The Hot Snow
In November, 1942, near the Volga, Stanlingrad is under siege of Commander Friederich Paulus and his 330,000 men. The Russian high command unleashes an operation to protect the Mishkova River to avoid that about four hundred tanks join Paulus' army. The Soviet artillery soldiers protect their position with their lives in a bloodshed with few survivors.
At War as at War
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.
We Are from Kronstadt
In 1919, during the post-revolution Russian Civil War, a naval detachment (made up of communist Reds) defends the strategic city of Petrograd from the White Russian counterrevolutionary forces
Two Soldiers
A story about the friendship between two young men, two soldiers - Arkady from Odessa and Sasha from Ural.
The Seventh Companion
A portrait of the era of "Red Terror" during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, The Seventh Companion offers a character study in General Adamov (Andrei Popov), a law professor in the tsarist army, who is incarcerated by the Bolshevik secret police along with many other members of the bourgeoisie. Finally released into the new world of the Soviet Union, the resigned officer finds that he has lost everything from his old life except a mantel clock that he carries through the night from place to place, until he ends up back where he started.
Wagtail's Army
The civil war in Russia, guerrillas fighting with Kolchak formations. As a result of sabotage, accident with white Russian train takes place. In disaster area the flag with the inscription "Wagtail's Army" is found. Kolchak commanders think that they are Bolsheviks, but guerrilla leader does not know anything. It turns out that this is work of three boys.
The Unforgettable Year 1919
Soviet propaganda film in two episodes about Stalin's strong and cruel suppression of the 1919 anti-communist uprising in St. Petersburg, Russia. Stalin and Lenin are shown as heroes who destroyed the efforts of anti-communists led by White Russians with support from "bad" British capitalists headed by Sir Winston Churchill and Lloyd George.
Chronicle of Flaming Years
Once again, director Yulia Solnsteva directs a movie that her late husband Alexandre Dovchenko scripted but did not live long enough to shoot. In this wartime drama, the emphasis is on the heroics of both the civilians and the soldiers during times of severe stress in World War II. At the core of the action is one man in particular, whose sacrifices and heroics speak for a much larger group.
Via Gobi and Khingan
About the events of the final stage of the Second World War — the defeat by Soviet and Mongolian troops of the selected Kwantung army. Bacteriological weapons were created in the laboratory of Japanese General Ishii Shiro. Experiments were conducted on prisoners of war and political prisoners. Epidemiologist Dmitry Sokolov was assigned to solve the mystery of this laboratory. At the cost of his own life, he completed the task. The march of Soviet and Mongolian formations through the Gobi sands and the Khingan spurs was not only a brilliant military operation, but also a warning of the use of bacteriological weapons by Japan.
Red Square
Dramatizes, in an official Soviet government release, the rise of the Red Army and the revolution that they eventually won.
Defeat of Yudenich
About the struggle of the red Army and the revolutionary workers of Petrograd against the white guards in 1919....
Days and Nights
This literary adaptation was the first Soviet feature length dramatization, as opposed to documentary film, on the momentous Battle of Stalingrad.
Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia
The fifth film of Frank Capra's Why We Fight propaganda film series, revealing the nature and process of the fight between the Soviet Union and Germany in the Second World War.
Zangezur
The film is about the civil war in the Zangezur (Syunik) province of Armenia in the early 1920s. The last Dashnak battalions headed by Sparapet Nzhdeh still opposed both the incursion of Red Army and the local Bolshevik partisans.