General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed

The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Место встречи изменить нельзя) is a five-episode Soviet television detective film released in November 1979, directed by Stanislav Govorukhin and starring Vladimir Vysotsky as police captain Gleb Zheglov and Vladimir Konkin as the demobilized intelligence officer Volodya Sharapov.¹ Set in postwar Moscow, it follows officers of the MUR, the Moscow criminal investigation department, as they hunt the gang known as the Black Cat.² The screenplay by Arkady and Georgy Vainer adapts their novel Era of Mercy (Эра милосердия), which was itself based on real events.²

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	November 1979 on Soviet television; produced by Odessa Film Studio¹^•³
Format	Five episodes, 350 minutes total, about 70 minutes per episode⁴^•⁵
Source	Novel Era of Mercy by Arkady and Georgy Vainer, based on real events²
Lead roles	Vladimir Vysotsky as Gleb Zheglov; Vladimir Konkin as Volodya Sharapov⁶
Key crew	Director Stanislav Govorukhin; cinematographer Leonid Burlaka; composer Yevgeny Gevorgyan¹
Reception	Kinopoisk rating 8.9 from over 507,000 votes, 14th place in its top 250¹
Restoration	Full 4K digital restoration at Mosfilm, first broadcast 28–29 March 2026 on the Rossiya channel⁷

Spoilers

Plot and setting

The action takes place in Moscow in 1945, just after the end of the Great Patriotic War, as the country returns to peacetime life while the Black Cat gang terrorizes the city.⁴^•⁷ The young officer Volodya Sharapov, demobilized from military intelligence, joins the MUR's anti-banditism department and becomes the partner of Captain Gleb Zheglov.⁸ One of the first cases Sharapov takes part in is the murder of Larisa Gruzdeva; the evidence points to her husband, the doctor Gruzdev, but Sharapov suspects the matter is not so simple.⁵

The dramatic center of the film is the argument between the two leads over whether the law may be broken in the name of justice. Zheglov, harsh and charismatic, is prepared to plant a wallet on the pickpocket Kirpich to secure an arrest; Sharapov insists this cannot be done.⁵ Critics have read the film as more than a procedural: it depicts a traumatized postwar society in which human life is devalued, and the conflict between Zheglov and Sharapov as a clash between two men each broken in his own way by the war years.⁹

Production

Govorukhin shot the film in 1978 and 1979 at the Odessa Film Studio and in Moscow, with Leonid Burlaka as cinematographer.¹⁰ The working title went through changes: Govorukhin first wanted to call the picture Black Cat, after the gang, but the name was refused, and decades later he acknowledged that the eventual title had proved the stronger one.¹¹

Location work required substitutions. By the late 1970s the Maryina Roshcha district had been rebuilt and no longer looked as it had in the late 1940s, so its scenes were filmed in Sokolniki. The mansion used for the police station, a 1908 art-nouveau building by the architect Appolos Pravdin, actually housed a music school at the time of filming.³

Vysotsky as Zheglov

Vladimir Vysotsky, already one of the Soviet Union's most popular singer-songwriters, played Gleb Zheglov, and his delivery gave the character much of the film's humor and energy.¹ Govorukhin recalled that Vysotsky wanted to sing several of his own songs in the film, but the director refused, judging that this would break the character: the result would be not Captain Zheglov but Vysotsky playing Captain Zheglov.³ Govorukhin also said the character described in the Vainer brothers' novel did not suit the actor, and the image had to be reworked for him.¹

The supporting cast drew on leading Soviet actors: Sergei Yursky as Ivan Sergeevich Gruzdev, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan as Gorbaty, Yevgeny Yevstigneyev as Pyotr Ruchnikov, Leonid Kuravlyov as Kopcheny, Alexander Belyavsky as Yevgeny Fox, Zinovy Gerdt as Bomze, and Svetlana Svetlichnaya, Larisa Udovichenko, Valery Zolotukhin's contemporaries Valeria Zaklunnaya and Stanislav Sadalsky among others.⁶ Ivan Bortnik, playing the gang member Promokashka, improvised lines that were not in the script, such as "Ne-ne, fraerok! Polny!", and critics later called his performance one of the best actor's solos in the film.⁸

Censorship and the novel

The film differs from Era of Mercy in several respects, and the Vainer brothers were unhappy with how the director handled their source: before the premiere they asked to have their names removed from the credits. The director and cinematographer Vadim Kostromenko quoted their complaint that they had written a novel not about Zheglov, the head of the MUR, but about Sharapov, a front-line officer who entered the police and fought against its abuses.⁸

Censorship also shaped the ending. A tragic finale was filmed, but Gosteleradio, the state broadcasting body, insisted on a positive ending, and part of the completed material was cut from the five-episode version.⁸ In the released finale, Zheglov prepares to shoot the captured gang member Levchenko and Sharapov shields him, a scene that has kept the argument between the two heroes unresolved for viewers.¹⁰

The film received no traditional cinema awards, but it was honored several times by the Ministry of Internal Affairs: the creators received certificates from the ministry in 1981, and Vysotsky, posthumously, and Konkin became laureates of the MVD of Russia's prize in culture, literature, and art.⁸

Cultural legacy

The series became one of the most quoted works in Russian popular culture. Lines such as "A thief must sit in prison", "Well, what a mug you have, Sharapov", and "A wallet, a wallet... what wallet?" entered everyday speech.⁷ Sociologists at the Levada Center noted that neither society nor the audience revised its attachment to the series across the Soviet-to-post-Soviet transition; it remained a leader of viewer attention and a standard element of socialization, and in late 2008, during the petition campaign over Svetlana Bakhmina's release, both supporters and opponents cited the series as an authority, one side quoting Gerdt's line about the coming "era of mercy" and the other Zheglov's "A thief must sit in prison".¹² The rock group Lyube dedicated the song "Atas" to the film, naming Gleb Zheglov and Volodya Sharapov in its lyrics.¹³

On Kinopoisk the film holds a user rating of 8.9 from more than 507,000 votes and ranks 14th on the site's top 250 list.¹

Restoration

Mosfilm carried out a full digital restoration of the film over several years, cleaning each frame by hand with specialized software and producing a 4K master; the project was initiated by Mosfilm's general director Karen Shakhnazarov as part of a program of restoring Russian film classics.⁷ The restored version was shown for the first time on 28 and 29 March 2026 on the Rossiya channel, timed to the 90th anniversary of Govorukhin's birth on 29 March, accompanied by memorial programming and a special project on the Smotrim platform.¹³^•⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1970s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?