Chapaev is a 1934 Soviet biographical war film, directed by the Vasilyev brothers for Lenfilm. A heavily-fictionalised biography of Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev (1887–1919), a Red Army notable commander of the Russian Civil War, it is based on the novel of the same name by Dmitri Furmanov, a Russian writer and Bolshevik commissar who fought together with Chapayev.