[4][5] Actress Vera Alentova, who starred in the film, is the mother of Vladimir Menshov's daughter Yuliya Menshova.

[7] His father, Valentin Mikhailovich Menshov, was a sailor and later an NKVD officer; his mother Antonina Aleksandrovna Menshova (née Dubovskaya) was a housewife.

[8] As a teenager Menshov worked as a machinist student at a factory, at a mine in Vorkuta, as a sailor on a diving boat in Baku, and also as an understudying actor at the Astrakhan Drama Theater.

[11] After graduating, he worked for two years as actor and assistant director at the Stavropol Regional Drama Theater.

[13] He made a short thesis film On the Question of the Dialectic of the Perception of Art, or Lost Dreams,[14] wrote the stage version of the novel Mess-Mend by Marietta Shaginyan, which was staged at the Leningrad Youth Theater,[15] and wrote the script I'm Serving on the Border at the request of Lenfilm.

[2] In those years his cinematic acting career began: he starred in the title role in the thesis work of his classmate Alexander Pavlovsky Happy Kukushkin.

[22] Menshov's second picture, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears became one of Russia's box-office record holders, was awarded the State Prize of the USSR, and then the Oscar (1981) as the Best Foreign Language Film.

In April 2001, he signed a letter in support of the recently elected Russian President Vladimir Putin's policy on Chechnya.

[34] In an interview with Esquire magazine in 2010, he stated that he joined it by accident and regrets it and treats the party's activities with irony, but does not leave its ranks in order to avoid scandal.

[36] In 2007, answering a question about a possible third term for Vladimir Putin's presidency, Menshov said that he was "sharply negative" about this scenario and criticized his colleagues who said there were no alternatives to the current head of state.

[41] In 2011, Menshov gave an interview about his political views, where he stated: "Over the years, it has become completely clear to me: if you take the path of anti-Sovietism, you will certainly come to outright Russophobia.