The Optimists (Season 1)

The Optimists (Оптимисты, 2017) is a Russian historical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Alexey Popogrebsky. The story follows a group of young Soviet Foreign Ministry diplomats in the early 1960s — the Khrushchev era, when the thaw was still thawing and the future felt open.

They are idealists with briefcases: ambitious, in love, convinced that honesty and talent count for something in the world. Then world-scale events start landing on their desks — the edges of nuclear crises, intelligence operations running beneath diplomatic ceremony, negotiations where the outcome shapes what gets taught in history class. The wide-eyed become calculating faster than any of them planned. Stars Andrei Smirnov, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Artyom Bystrov, Severija Janušauskaite, and Jonathan Solvay.

Popogrebsky shoots the period without triumphalism — what he's after is the precise moment these people stopped being optimists and what it cost them. Stream The Optimists (2017) online on iFILM.