5 Soviet adventure movies you can watch for FREE

1 ‘Beware of the Car’, 1966 

Yuri Detochkin works in auto insurance by day and steals them from dishonest owners – bribe-takers and speculators – by night. After reselling them, this Soviet ‘Robin Hood’ donates the proceeds to orphanages. The humble insurance agent manages to evade the police for a long time, but, eventually, turns himself in. One of the most striking scenes in the movie about this “noble” thief is the police officer's pursuit of Detochkin, who is driving a stolen ‘Volga’ car.

2 ‘Gentlemen of Fortune’, 1971

Troshkin, the director of a kindergarten, is sent to a penal colony under the guise of a repeat offender named Dotsent. There, he must find out from his accomplices the location of Alexander the Great's helmet, stolen from an archeological dig. The kind-hearted Troshkin diligently memorizes thieves' slang and puts on a menacing face so that the phrase: "I'll rip your mouth open and gouge your eyes out!" sounds convincing and then he convinces his fellow inmates to escape. And while searching for the treasure, he tries to reform them.

3 ‘Ivan Vasilyevich Changes Profession’, 1973 

A comedy based on a short story by Mikhail Bulgakov, in which an inventor named Shurik creates a time machine and uses it to open a portal to the time of Ivan the Terrible. When the machine breaks down, building manager Bunsh and burglar Georges Miloslavsky get stuck in the 16th-century Moscow Kremlin, while the tsar ends up in modern-day Moscow.

4 ‘At Home Among Strangers, a Stranger Among His Own’, 1974

An ‘ostern’ (Soviet western) about a gold train robbery. Half a million rubles worth of gold is being transported from Siberia to Moscow to be used to buy bread. Following a tip from a traitor, the cargo is stolen by former White Army officers. The protagonist, the sole survivor among those who were supposed to transport the gold, decides to recover it and, at the same time, find the traitor within the ranks of the ‘Cheka’.

5 ‘Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia’, 1974 

Disguised as Italian tourists, treasure hunters arrive in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). They don't know exactly where to look, having only vague clues to go on. So, they try to find it under a monument to Leo Tolstoy, then at the zoo. They eventually obtain the treasure, but not everyone gets a share: the most enterprising among them invests their companion's share in the purchase of a map indicating the location of the next treasure.