those crazy Russians and their animated Baba Yaga's huts.

It seems like it's probably true, though this footage may be a re-enactment. :
"However, while the film could have been re-staged for the camera, it almost certainly depicts a series of real experiments. Bryukhonenko's work with canine circulation seems obscure today, but at the time was well publicized; his decapitation experiment even remarked upon by George Bernard Shaw.[1] Bryukhonenko's procedures are attested to in numerous books and medical papers, with some sources providing detailed technical information on the operations shown in the film. These texts also shed light on failures not mentioned in the film. For example, the severed heads survived only minutes in artificial circulation, while the resuscitated dogs often died after a few days.
Perhaps most importantly, Bryukhonenko's research was vital to the development of open-heart procedures in Russia. He was one of the leaders of the Research Institute of Experimental Surgery, where Professor A.A. Vishnevsky performed the first Soviet open-heart operation in 1957. Bryukhonenko developed a new version of the autojektor (for use on humans) in the same year; it can be seen today on display at the Museum of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Scientific Center of Cardiovascular Surgery in Russia. Bryukhonenko was awarded the prestigious Lenin Prize posthumously."
(wikipedia - though, especially in cases such as this, wikipedia warrants fact-confirmation; everthing else I've seen online points to this being true - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms)
Full video (20 min) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap1co5ZZHYE
http://time-proxy.yaga.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,851883,00.html
http://analytics.ex.ru/cgi-bin/txtnscr.pl?node=578&txt=460&lang=2&sh=1