‘Dear Comrades!’ Shows How to Erase History and Humanity
If history matters — an assumption we might have once taken for granted — one reason is to ensure crucial events are not forgotten due to the march of time. In today’s climate of manufactured truths and glib whataboutism, it is hard to believe that any historical memory has the power to change minds or poke holes in some demagogue’s balloon of hot air. But in the Soviet Union portrayed in Andrei Konchalovsky’s icy yet searing historical drama Dear Comrades!, the commissars busy erasing the record of a massacre make the argument that history does matter. They are so certain history matters that they go to extraordinary lengths to literally bury it. The corpses of murdered civilians are quickly thrown into unmarked graves while the bloodied pavement where they were shot is covered over with fresh asphalt. In the sullied tradition of functionaries throughout the ages, the commissars’ faith in the power of history to haunt or provide future evidence against them does not lead to any reconsideration of their actions.
Set over the first few days of June 1962 in Novocherkassk, a blue-collar industrial city in the Don River region of southern Russia, Dear Comrades! views the events of that year’s long-hidden massacre mostly through the eyes of one true Soviet believer. A party official who seems moderately less cynical than most of her peers, Lyuda (Yulia Vysotskaya) starts the movie off complaining about how much the workers are complaining about recent price hikes, shortages, and wage reductions. As sharp and rigidly defined as the movie’s crisp black-and-white cinematography, she dismisses dissatisfaction over the “temporary hardships”. As an official who is sleeping with an even more senior (and married) official, she gets to breeze past the people desperately queuing for food and help herself to the finer things hidden in a store’s back room, the hypocrisy is clear to viewers but not to herself.
That blindness means that when thousands of enraged workers at the Electric Locomotive Works walk off work and storm the offices, she is as gobsmacked as the rest of her cant-spouting peers. One of Lyuda’s sweaty and panicked superiors provides some unintentional irony with his expostulations (“A fucking strike in our socialist community! How is this possible?”). But the entire chain of command is just as flummoxed when the protestors head towards the city, brandishing pictures of Lenin and positioning themselves as truer socialists than the bureaucrats, a neat inversion of Lyuda’s viewpoint in which they are the traitors and those like her the real keepers of the flame.
Even when the army is called in to put down the “hooligans,” confusion and shock remain the order of the day. A general argues that the constitution forbids his soldiers from using live munitions against their own people (his character may be inspired by the real-life example of World War II hero General Matvei Shaposhnikov, drummed out of the Communist Party after refusing to attack the Novocherkassk protestors). This is a particularly rewarding aspect of Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva’s screenplay, which similarly to Craig Mazin’s Chernobyl complicates the simplistic view of societies like the Soviet Union by showing how even the most rigid autocracies are still composed of humans who occasionally push back against their propaganda-soaked environments.
Not surprisingly, the KGB as shown here has fewer compunctions about taking part in such state-sanctioned violence. Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva’s screenplay has KGB snipers initiating the killing of at least a couple dozen and likely more unarmed people. After the massacre itself, a chillingly quiet and almost static sequence in which bystanders and shopkeepers are gunned down along with flag-waving marchers and all their bodies flung unceremoniously into blood-drenched trucks, Lyuda faces what might be her first true crisis of faith when she realizes that her daughter Sveta (Yulia Burova), who works at the Electric Locomotive Works, may be among the dead.
Lyuda’s hunt for Svetka takes up most of the second half of the movie. In dramatic terms, this is something less successful, as it hinges on Viktor (Andrei Gusev), a charming KGB agent who all too conveniently appears at just the right time to shepherd her through various obstacles. That search takes her through the layers of double-talk and deceit with which the Soviet apparatus, so slow to provide basics like food yet swift to protect its sense of legitimacy, uses to wipe the massacre’s memory clean. KGB agents use an assembly-line approach to what looks like hundreds if not thousands of people signing non-disclosure agreements about what they terming “certain events” even as higher-ranking officials blame “agitators,” the Voice of America, and Cossacks for the massacre that never happened. Meanwhile, the TV shows an endless loop of bullyingly cheerful propaganda.
As Lyuda moves through her stages of denial, the movie illustrates in its stark way not just the region’s layers of buried pain but the attractiveness of autocracies. She pines for the brutal certainties of Stalin and despises the reform-minded criticisms of his successor Khrushchev (“now nothing makes sense”). Her fanaticism is so ingrained that after her drunk and embittered father (Sergei Erlish) tells her stories of revolution-era Bolshevik savageries, she can only blame the victims for not going along with things: “What was to be done?”
But even though Lyuda’s bulldozer manner and tunnel vision set her up as an easy villain, Dear Comrades! avoids making her or characters like her the target. While it is difficult to watch her inhuman responses to pleas which threaten to complicate her Stalinist worldview, her performance vividly shows that her resistance to the realities of the history (including that which she witnessed before being told to forget) has more to do with protecting herself from facing all that she has suffered and sacrificed. When her father asks rhetorically, “What am I supposed to believe in, if not communism?” Lyuda has no good answer. History can have no effect on her, or any like her, if she simply refuses to consider it.
Title: Dear Comrades!
Director: Andrei Konchalovsky
Writers: Andrei Konchalovsky, Elena Kiseleva
Cast: Yulia Vysotskaya, Vladislav Komarov, Andrei Gusev, Yulia Burova, Sergei Erlish, Dmitry Kostyaev
Studio: NEON
Rating: NR
Year: 2020
Official site
