Two Comrades Were Serving

Two Comrades Were Serving (1968) is a Soviet civil war drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Yevgeny Karelov. The Crimean Peninsula, 1920: the White Guard is making its last stand and the Red Army is moving in for the final assault.

Two Red Army men — frontline cameraman Nekrasov (Oleg Yankovsky) and his mismatched partner Karyakin (Rolan Bykov) — move through the chaos of the closing campaign. Running alongside their story is a White Guard officer named Brusentsov, played by Vladimir Vysotsky, who watches everything he believed in fall apart around him. Vysotsky brings a bleak, unmelodramatic grief to the role that makes Brusentsov the film's most memorable figure — despite being on the losing side. Anatoly Papanov and Iya Savvina round out the cast.

Karelov made a film where neither side collapses into symbol. The ending lands hard precisely because both stories carry weight. Stream Two Comrades Were Serving online on iFILM.