June 1962: Novocherkassk, the USSR. The halcyon days of Stalin’s premiership, where meat rations were plentiful and cigarettes easy to come by, are over. The Soviet people face conditions of significant hardship: Socks are seldom free of holes, backroom trades are conducted for pantyhose and candy bars, and crowds build from dusk at the local deli, desperate for whatever rations they can grab. The prices of meat and milk are on the rise and rates for workers are falling – conditions one might consider ripe for revolution. Rise up, comrades!
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“Dear Comrades!,” from veteran Russian auteur Andrei Konchalovsky, is a fascinating blend of dark satire and bleak archaeology. It captures the moments leading up to, during, and immediately after the Novocherkassk Massacre, the real-life massacre of workers striking over the nation’s ever-worsening living conditions at a locomotive plant. Due to rigorous state suppression, the events remained hidden until the early-‘90s. Rendered in grainy black-and-white and framed in academy ratio, the film evokes the look of Soviet (and, of course, Hollywood) films of the era, cementing it within this very particular historical moment.
The film’s anchor is Lyuda, played with remarkable grit by Julia Vysotskaya, a fanatical member of the Communist Party and a leading figure within local governance. To start, she is the poster woman of Soviet nationalism; through these “conditions of hardship,” as she coins them with the acuity of a slick rhetorician, she keeps a stiff upper lip and demands that everyone else does the same. It is for the good of the USSR, for the good of Socialism, and even as everything seems to collapse, her devotion barely falters. Her daughter, Svetka, serves to represent the generational divide. She openly questions the integrity of the Khrushchev regime at the dinner table, to which Lyuda responds with a flurry of slaps and punches.
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Lyuda arrives to work at her office with the rest of the local governance, a hodge-podge of useless bureaucrats in poorly fitted suits. Compared to the lot of them Lyuda seems to glow with integrity, even if she is an ideological crank. Sirens wail in the distance and soon the workers of Novocherkassk unite at their doors, waving placards of Lenin and chanting the old slogans. This section of the film utilizes physical comedy to great effect: As bricks rain through the windows, the party members are marshaled by their Red Army protectors into a safe room, huddling like penguins.
Graphic, bloody, and terse, no punches are pulled with the massacre itself. A chaotic long-take, where blood splatters and bodies fly limp, makes for an unsettling showcase of cinematographer Andrey Naidenov’s talents. Coming at the film’s midpoint it serves as a sobering moment – there are no cartoonish, suited fanatics to laugh at here, marking a tremendous tonal dip. The focus of “Dear Comrades!” then shifts to the real-life suppression of the massacre, as nurses tending the wounded are forced to sign non-disclosure agreements by faceless KGB agents and dissenters are murdered in the streets.
The film contends that the massacre is less the result of men being evil so much as it is ruthless bureaucracy. In one scene, a hard-boiled general recites from memory the execution process followed by the KGB – recalling the specific knot used to tie the hands of men to be shot, he says that he “must be able to do it with [his] eyes closed by now.” Not that he shows any sign of sociopathy. He is but a cog in a ruthless, well-oiled machine, which is all the more terrifying. To exhume the violent state oppression of the Soviet Union is hardly new, but it has been rarely depicted with such bluntness.
Both aesthetically and thematically the film is sure to provoke comparisons to Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War,” which posited a similarly damning depiction of the Soviet propaganda machine. But where “Cold War” feels distant in its retrospective lens, “Dear Comrades!” is very much rooted in the history it seeks to depict. This is no doubt down, in part, to the film’s production design: Arguably its strongest aspect, everything from the era’s brutalist architecture to its faded propaganda posters are astutely reproduced. It’s like holding a relic in your hands. The film does feel slightly longer than it should be – the final third, particularly, would benefit from minor cuts – but, all-in-all, this is a fine addition to Konchalovsky’s extensive filmography. [B]
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