A Slave of Love (Russian: Раба любви, romanized: Raba lyubvi) is a 1976 Soviet romantic comedy-drama film directed by Nikita Mikhalkov and written by Friedrich Gorenstein and Andrey Konchalovskiy.

The silent movie star, Olga Voznesenskaya, has just celebrated a triumph, along with her co-star and lover, Vladimir Maksakov, in the romantic comedy "Slave of Love".

The Bolsheviks have captured Moscow, and the film team moves south, to Odessa, in order to work on a new production away from the fighting.

Additionally, Fedotov, the local spy chief of the "White Guard" (an important anti-Bolshevik force in the all too real Civil War of the time), appears on the film set with increasing frequency, while Bolsheviks are being arrested across the land.

The taste of audiences for silent movies has moved on, and there is a requirement for exotic embellishments which Voznesenskaya, like her absent partner Maksakov, rejects as artistically counter-productive.

But when Voznesenskaya over-reacts and runs off to a cinema, announcing that the film they are making is a lie, she is showered with flowers by her fans, which mollifies her a little.

As Potozki's true priorities emerge little by little, two powerful sets of emotions begin to overlap, with Olga's exclamation, "My God, what a beautiful thing it is to take part in a cause for which you might die or end up in prison!"

Olga appears to have fallen in love with Potozki, with whom she meets up in a cafe so that he can hand over the secret film roll for her to keep safely till the evening.

That evening the White Russian spy, Fedotov, again turns up on the film-set, where the production team are trying to get the by now thoroughly apathetic Olga to finish the climactic suicide scene in their movie.

[2] In 1972, the Soviet director Rustam Khamdamov started to make a biographical film about Kholodnaya, under the title "Нечаянные радости" ("Inadvertent Pleasures"); but the production was interrupted and the project was never completed.

However, the "secret film" produced by Viktor of White Guard atrocities, included when he screens it for Olga, uses monochrome: these sections are indeed interspliced with contemporary Russian Civil War footage.

[4] Nancy Condee notes, that by combining revolutionary message with melodramatic mode of expression, Mikhalkov is able to "gesture at a space beyond Marxism-Leninism while at the same time in no sense opposing or negating it".

West German television audiences had their first opportunity to see the movie only on 28 February 1996, long after reunification, when it was screened on the Franco-German Arte channel.