Pirates of the 20th Century
1980 film by Boris Durov
Pirates of the 20th Century (Russian: Пираты XX века, translit. Piraty XX veka) is a 1980 Soviet action/adventure film about modern piracy. The film was directed by Boris Durov, the story was written by Boris Durov and Stanislav Govorukhin.
The film was the leader of Soviet distribution in 1980 and had 87.6 million viewers. It was the highest grossing domestically produced film in the Soviet Union.
Plot
The film begins with a convoy of military vehicles rolling into a seaport located somewhere in Middle East in the bank of Indian or Pacific Ocean and stopping near the pier where the Soviet cargo ship Nezhin is anchored. An agent of a local pharmaceutical company meets the captain of the Soviet vessel and discusses the cargo, medical opium, which is in critical demand by the hospitals of the USSR. Soon after that the pharmaceutical company agent is seen inside a car, speaking to someone via walkie-talkie. Later the MV Nezhin, with the opium on board, leaves port for Vladivostok.
Some distance into the voyage, a watchman cries "man overboard" and the captain orders the engines stopped to rescue the stranded swimmer. The boat from Nezhin picks up an Asian man who identifies himself as Salekh, the only surviving sailor from a foreign merchant ship.
“Pirates of the 20th Century” enters the record as 1980 film by Boris Durov. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pirates, 20th and Century can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1976506. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pirates of the 20th Century” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.