Queridos Camaradas

I kept thinking of our current times and how events such as happened in Novocherkaask could happen here. In the film a wildcat strike by workers is dismissed by local party officials until it gets out of hand when the workers take control of the factory. The regional government then steps in and is also ineffectual so the army and KGB are called in which eventually leads to a massacre. Poignantly told from the perspective of of loyal party official who receives assistance from a sympathetic KGB official in trying to find her missing daughter in the midst of a town under siege. Well worth watching from both a historical and from a gripping dramatic presentation.

'Dear Comrades' (2020) presented in world wide premiere at the Venice Film Festival where it won the special jury award proves that at the age of 83 Andrey Konchalovskiy is not satisfied with just being a living legend. The screenwriter of the first films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the director who joined Tarkovsky and his own younger brother Nikita Mikhalkov in making outstanding movies in the '70s that signaled in cinema, before Gorbachev's 'glasnost', the thaw that was to come, has returned to Russia in the last decades after a stormy stage in Hollywood and makes a significant film every few years. 'Dear Comrades' is one of the best of his career, a haunting description of a dark episode of totalitarian repression in the Soviet era, a film that can be said to come a few decades too late but is still relevant today, as any good lesson in history is important in the actuality. It is in any case a remarkable film both in content and in the way the message is transformed into images and transmitted to viewers.

The confusion of values and the gap between ideals and reality dominate the film. The period in which the action takes place is one of those considered relatively 'liberal' in the history of the USSR, the one in which Khrushchev was in power. He had denounced Stalin's crimes (to which he had been an accomplice at least through passivity) after his death, but continued a policy of competition with the West outside and of repression inside. In order to achieve their ambitious economic plans, the Soviet leaders subjected the population to severe economic shortages and any attempt at revolt was suppressed, if necessary by force. Confusion reigned among the population. "In Stalin's time, prices were falling, now they are rising," we hear Soviet citizens in the Don area where the film's action takes place complaining. Young people and workers naively believe in the apparent democratization and in the rights enshrined in the Constitution, but when they claim them and resort to strikes and demonstrations to protest against economic problems, the response of the party and of and its tools of repression are bullets and arrests. Lyuda, the main heroine of the film (played exceptionally by Yuliya Vysotskaya) is an activist in the city party committee, not very important in rank, but significant enough to benefit from direct supply from food warehouses while her fellow citizens stand in endless lines for anything . She is indoctrinated and longs for Stalin ('in his time I knew who the enemies were'). When her daughter (Yuliya Burova), a factory worker, disappears after the demonstrations are stifled in blood, her devotion to the party is put to the test. Her disabled and alcoholic father (Sergei Erlish) keeps in his chest the uniform of the Cossack and the icon of the Mother of God on the Don, connections hidden in fear with a past that the authorities want forgotten and buried. Ideological dilemmas and gaps dominate the relations between generations in the conditions in which truth cannot be spoken even between parents and children within the walls of their own homes.

The cinematography is cold, almost documentary. Konchalovskiy uses black and white film and the 4: 3 screen format specific to the Mosfilm studios in the years when the story takes place. The endless meetings of the party bureaucracy, corruption and cowardice of activists, the intervention of the leaders of the 'center', food queues and material deprivation, fear of the KGB, all these will be familiar to spectators who lived in the Eastern Europe before the fall of Communism. Humanity appears where we do not expect it - human gestures of solidarity of simple people, the refusal of some officers to arm their soldiers against the workers, the KGB member who helps Lyuda in the most difficult moments. What seems different is the ideological confusion that the characters seem to be dominated by. Lyuda is unable to live in a different system of reference than the communist one ('without communism what are we left with?'). Adoration of Stalin seems to be a kind of Stockholm complex that escapes any logic. Konchalovskiy doesn't even try to explain it. Can this attitude be considered a symbol of Russia's history in the last century? The answers are left to the spectators.

Konchalovsky builds a look at communism from the silent accomplices, those who know nothing or want to know nothing. This social brainwashing causes the protagonist to long for Stalin, even though she faces the horrors of the KGB. The film has a frenetic pace, of constant dynamism, although in this case the 4: 3 screen, and its unbalanced frames, does not seem the best format for the story. There is a casual look that however does not hide the drama of the story.

The sight of massed workers marching against the Soviet government demanding MORE Communism may strike many as strange, yet it is just one of the many seeming contradictions here. Director and Co-Writer Andrey Konchalovskiy (RUNAWAY TRAIN, INNER CIRCLE) has fashioned his tale (with Elena Kiseleva) out of a tragic 1962 incident where factory workers were shot at by government officials leaving at least 26 dead.

Lyuda (Yuliya Vysotskaya; the Director's wife) is a committee member for the town of Novocherkassk. As an apparatchik, she eats and drinks better than those she serves. When we first see her she's in the midst of an affair with a married official. Her daughter is an agitator at the factory in question. And, her father hasn't lived down his anti-government views from his youth. Lyuda is clearly supposed to represent the many hypocrisies of the Soviet system. When the fateful day occurs, Lyuda is caught in the middle of the literal crossfire.

Konchalovsky builds his movie slowly. The details of the bureaucracy are laid out as are the intertwined loyalties which abound. The truth is both impossible to discern, but, seemingly frowned up. Andrey Naydenov shoots brilliantly in stark Black & White and framed in classic 1:37 aspect ratio. There is no musical score, only traditional Soviet music, often propaganda heard in the background. Even with this bleak style Konchalovsky manages to finagle a underlying streak of bitter humor. Chairman Nikita Khrushchev's policies were so unpopular that many Soviets were pining for a return of genocidal former leader Joseph Stalin. Just over two years after the massacre, Khrushchev would himself be forced out of office. No matter how much the events effect her personally, Lyuda is both a true believer and a blind loyalist - and, can't distinguish the two. Vysotskaya's performance superbly navigates her character's (and that of her country) paradoxes with skill and vigor. As does DEAR COMRADES! Itself.

The photography in "Dear Comrades" reminds very closely Konchalovsky's 2016 film, Ray (Paradise): 4:3 aspect ratio, black and white, digital camera usage. Yet, the two films are strongly different, although they somehow feel intrinsically connected.

"Dear Comrades" describes a workers strike occured in 1962 in Novocherkassk that was controversially smothered in blood, as seen from the point of view of a local party member (Yuliya Vyotskaya, who also the leading role in "Paradise").

It was impossible for me not to compare this film with Eisenstein's 1925 masterpiece "The Strike", which also features a revolution of the workers but against a zarist government. It is interesting to see how the tables have turned, and that same soviet government that threw over the zarist government acts exactly the same way. The film had also a bit of an "Ida" vibe, again minus the spiritual elements, and the ending sequence felt much like a classic hollywood drama's finale, intentionally so, which I found somewhat fitting to the slightly satyrical nature of the title.

Let me be clear: this film is far from a satyre, it depicts with an almost Bressonian simplicity the dynamics of power and secrecy that were central to the functioning of the Soviet Union.

Unlike the 2016 film, Dear Comrades has no spiritual dimension, it is strongly linked to the presentation of facts, as it should be, given the strong materialist/soviet tone of its story. Similarly to Paradise, though, it shows the brainwashing effects of the Stalinist era: the lead character has, until the end, a nostalgic attitude towards Stalin, whom she defends even when confronted with the gruesome crimes committed in his name.

I hope that Dear Comrades gets distributed widely. Konchalovsky has been directing very outstanding films the whole decade, and this is yet another one of them.