Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession

Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession (1973) is a Soviet comedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Leonid Gaidai and adapted from Mikhail Bulgakov's play Ivan Vasilyevich. It has been running as a near-permanent fixture of Russian TV ever since.

Engineer Timofeyev finishes his homemade time machine, runs a test, and punches a hole straight through to 16th-century Moscow — right into the chambers of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Two neighbours tumble backwards through it: pompous building manager Ivan Vasilyevich Bunsha (Yuri Yakovlev) and quick-fingered thief Zhorz Miloslavsky (Leonid Kuravlyov). The Tsar himself lands in 1973, bewildered by lifts and tape recorders. Alexander Demyanenko plays the panicking inventor; Mikhail Pugovkin, Savely Kramarov and Natalia Selezneva fill out an ensemble that turns every scene into a relay race of comic timing.

Gaidai kept Bulgakov's satirical bite intact — bureaucratic pomposity, official cowardice, and the absurdity of authority are all there, wrapped in farce tight enough that Soviet censors couldn't easily excise them. Fifty years on, the film still lands every joke. Stream Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession online on iFILM.