After graduating at 1964, he joined the Krasnoyarsk Children's Theater, where - in spite of having tense relations with the director - he was considered the best comical actor among the cast.

When a letter from the Mosfilm studio reached Krasnoyarsk, offering Olyalin the main role in Yuri Ozerov's Liberation, one of the couriers told him of the matter.

The character of Captain Tzvetaev, which he portrayed in the five parts of Liberation, gained him fame throughout the Soviet Union.

He starred in several films during the early 1970s, among which was the popular Gentlemen of Fortune, and received the Ukrainian SSR Komsomol's Nikolai Ostrovsky Prize in 1972.

The secretary of the Communist Party in Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, a personal friend of Olyalin, arranged for him to be taken into rehabilitation.