Note: The writer of this review watched Dear Comrades! on a digital screener from home. Before making the decision to see it—or any other film—in a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Here’s an interview on the matter with scientific experts.
That Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky’s film Dear Comrades!, about the hushed-up 1962 massacre in Novocherkassk, is meant to provoke is clear from the first moments: The serious-looking opening credits are accompanied by the Soviet (and now Russian) national anthem, to which Konchalovsky’s father, Sergey Mikhalkov, wrote the words. Without some context, this might seem like a note of irony; to anyone familiar with the politics involved, it should elicit a groan.
Konchalovsky, after all, has had a bizarre, charmed career, the highlights of which include writing the screenplays for two Andrei Tarkovsky films, Andrei Rublev and Ivan’s Childhood, and directing the Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell team-up Tango & Cash. Though less of a wingnut than his brother, the actor, director, and film-industry monocrat Nikita Mikhalkov, he has long been a soft-power Putinist, enjoying all of the privileges of state approval, from financing (Dear Comrades! was produced by the billionaire Alisher Usmanov) to the ever-accumulating medals and honorary titles that have been a tradition of officialdom since Soviet times.
Of course, arch-conservative leanings are hardly unusual for Russian cultural figures who get exported abroad, though they are rarely recognized as such in different social climes further West. The problem is that Konchalovsky, who peaked as a director around Runaway Train in 1985, no longer displays the talent to back them up. This is how he articulates the ambitions of Dear Comrades!: It’s in black and white and Academy ratio. If it looks like an award-winning art film, then, by golly, it must be one.
In fact, the first act of the film—also its strongest stretch—is basically a comedy. The protagonist, Lyuda (Yuliya Vysotskaya), is a fortysomething functionary in Novocherkassk, a small city with a major electric locomotive industry. Outside of stultifying Communist Party committee meetings, she is carrying on an affair with a married KGB investigator, Loginov (Vladislav Komarov). The USSR is still in the midst of the reformist Khrushchev Thaw, but the local mood is low; food prices are rising and there are shortages of kefir and milk.
Lyuda herself is buying pantry staples from a black market grocer, which allows Konchalovsky to poke fun of mundane Soviet hypocrisies—an easy but reliable target. Nonetheless, she remains outwardly a true believer in communism and the officially disavowed Joseph Stalin, much to annoyance of her teenage daughter Svetka (Yulia Burova) and her aging dad (Sergei Erlish), a cranky Don Cossack who is still proud of having fought for the short-lived, anti-Bolshevik Don Republic, which claimed Novocherkassk as its capital during the Russian Civil War.
When word comes of a strike at the local locomotive factory, panic immediately sets in among the local administrators, Lyuda included. The higher authorities have already been notified and are on their way. Reports of a gathering crowd (“They have red banners and pictures of Lenin!”) lead to frantic attempts to control the revolt, rapidly devolving into farce. Government representatives in uniform deploy assorted profanities, a boundlessly rich Russian art form that unfortunately cannot be translated into the limited vocabulary and grammar of English swearing. As it becomes clear that Moscow is willing to resort to gunfire to disperse the protesters, the situation ceases to be funny.
Then comes the massacre, which Konchalovsky directs in ways that are both blunt and artless. According to the official investigation carried out after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 26 people were killed when soldiers opened fire on the crowd, their bodies quickly buried in secret; many more were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms. The event, which happened with full approval from the top, is one of the bloodier stains on the Nikita Khrushchev era’s reputation as an ostensibly liberal time in Soviet history.
In its bleak aftermath, Dear Comrades! becomes a different kind of film, one of those protracted searches for a missing person that demands to be read as a metaphor for cultural trauma. The metaphor, however, is perniciously nationalist in a way that has proven to be very effective. At the risk of trying to capital-E Explain Russia, one might summarize like this: It is the belief that history is an endurance test, of which Russians have been the undisputed champions.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this cultural pride; the evidence to back it up is considerable. The issue is how it gets explained. In Dear Comrades!, it comes down a purity of belief: Stalinism may have been filled with horrors and purges, but at least dyed-in-the-wool Stalinists believed in something. Konchalovsky shows us the emptiness behind the Khrushchev façade, turning Lyuda into a figure whose faith and perseverance are validated, even as everything else crumbles.
Critics are often accused of reviewing a filmmaker’s politics over the film. But the truth is that, outside of welcome stretches of humor (in the beginning) and tension (towards the end), there isn’t much more to Dear Comrades!. The script is filled with flat, rhetorical speeches that are done no favors by Konchalovsky’s static direction. Characters tender political positions, setting up a clumsy ideological conflict between the duplicitously cynical and the devoted, be they bearers of Lenin portraits or bearers of icons. This might sound like a nice sentiment, but not when it’s so clearly entangled in the ongoing revisionist project of the Putin perma-presidency, which has produced a fair number of officially supported, Oscar-submitted works that attempt to rehabilitate the Stalin era without trying to rehabilitate Stalin. Opposition to one authority is not the same thing as antiauthoritarianism, though the two have been mixed up many times—often with tragic consequences.
28 Comments
I’ve always thought it weird how poorly Khrushchev is viewed in Soviet history. Besides the denouncing of Stalin (admittedly somewhat hypocritical given that he had been in Stalin’s inner circle), pretty much all the events that made the Soviet Union briefly ahead of the West happened in his reign — Sputnik, Laika, and Yuri Gagarin’s flight.
Propaganda distractions to get Russian’s minds off the continued violent suppression of human rights activists during the 60s which led to the Prague Spring.
Khrushchev was brought down by the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was seen (rightly or not) as a huge loss for the Soviet Union, especially among party leadership…
The problem is that Kruschev looks good compared to Stalin, but that’s hardly a great recommendation, and he was a half-assed liberaliser which means he was never going to satisfy either the progressives or the hardliners in the Party. And it didn’t help that he was a huge blowhard. I don’t know about you, but the story of Kruschev slamming his shoe on the podium at the UN (beware — any photos or videos you see are fake, there was no captured footage of the event) makes him seem like a toddler having a temper tantrum, not a strong leader standing up for the Soviet.
Government representatives in uniform deploy assorted profanities, a boundlessly rich Russian art form that unfortunately cannot be translated into the limited vocabulary and grammar of English swearing.This is a fun flex.
That’s also my favorite part of this review, and now I want a whole article on this. I need to know more about the breadth and depth of the Russian language’s arsenal of profanity.
It actually sent my head spinning for a bit. Because of course logically I know native speakers of other languages don’t translate their speech, what they learn is explained and defined by the structures and definitions that constitute their language. But part of my brain is like “But how can it not translate?” And then I had this sort of existential moment of realization that I will never truly know the meaning of some of these words, no matter how long I study them, because to me I will always be relating them back to English. It’s a funny thing to wrap your head around.
I’m guessing, though, that the meaning can be understood perfectly well, or explained for more cryptic stuff, but literal renderings would draw more attention for being unnatural as English rather than being the visceral swearing they’re meant to be.
The couple Russians I have known have both commented on how limited English is generally as compared to Russian.
I sort of love how a guy who wrote for Tarkovsky went on to direct Tango and Cash.
Tarkovsky movies feel intensely visual and atmospheric in a way that is less script-dependent than a more straightforward drama. Like, I sometimes try to imagine Stalker as directed by Ron Howard or something, and it always makes me laugh.
That said, yes, that’s a hell of a career move.
I’ve never seen Tango and Cash but it’s one of those basic cable staples, right? Pretty decent cultural footprint. But I had never even heard of Runaway Train until fairly recently and that is an incredible movie with a solid pedigree — Jon Voight and Eric Roberts, both Oscar-nominated! Akira Kurasowas screenplay! Awesome train stunts! — that seems to have fallen off the map and that is a damn shame. It takes endurance and perseverance into a weird, quasi-mystical place by the end, you could maybe read a political metaphor in terms of man vs. state but it transcends that in a way that makes it more dangerous, maybe. Too bad Konchalovsky’s direction has fallen off and his pandering gone up since then.
It’s not so much a comment on the quality of the movies but more an observation that a buddy cop comedy and Andrei Rublev aren’t usually in the same sentence.
Don’t tell me you haven’t seen Tarkovsky’s lone sequel, Stalker and Hooch?
My father discovered Runaway Train as a VHS rental in the mid-80s and actually rented it several times to watch it repeatedly, something he NEVER did with any other movie. It made an impression on me as a kid. You probably have to be into that kind of grim-and-gritty Existential Dude Movie of the 80s, but it’s a great one.
Runaway Train is an unsung masterpiece — but I suspect it has more to do with Kurosawa’s screenplay than Konchalovksy’s (admittedly very good) direction.
That’s awesome. This is what I was trying to get at, your dad should’ve been able to catch this on WGN on a Saturday afternoon every four months or so instead of having to rent it over and over, the way you could regularly find a Tango and Cash. But its existential grimness was too much for TV, I guess.
When it came out it definitely received great reviews.
One of those film reviews where I feel smarter after. Terrific.Are they any *good* films out of Russia on the Khrushchev period?
the photos on imdb are all too new for the Soviet Union in 1962 from the design and the scene with the girl from Goodfellas holding an Air New Zealand bag this is the Antarctica airplane crash why are you pretending to review this now when the film and the imdb page are months old I don’t know it probably isn’t a very good idea to fly on Air New Zealand airplane though
that attempt to rehabilitate the Stalin era without trying to rehabilitate StalinThe Oscar submissions may be about the only halfway efforts; the concerted Russian state efforts to rehabilitate Stalin among the Russian people have been one of the most disturbing aspects of Putin’s reign.Worst yet, they’ve largely worked. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stalin was wildly unpopular, with something like 75% disapproval ratings. Today he and his era are viewed positively by north of 70% of the Russian people.
I wonder how that tracks w/ Russian age demographics–how close is it to a generation that experienced him and his cohort vs just via history books.
From what I remember, it hasn’t hurt.While the phenomenon has been little discussed in popular media, a decent amount of academics have written about it and I think I’ve run across one making a similar point before.
“…the belief that history is an endurance test, of which Russians have been the undisputed champions…There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this cultural pride; the evidence to back it up is considerable.”Hmm. Not to downplay the struggles of Russians through history, but I’d suggest that maybe people like Ukrainians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis and Russian Jews shared all the struggles of Russia with added oppression *by* Russia.
Russia will always fight to the last Ukrainian and Belarusian against its enemies!
Let’s not forget all the other countries that endured communism in the aftermath of WWII.
IV, this review doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Spin disguised as a history lesson can describe plenty of western movies too. I know it’s been a while, but isn’t that what was going on in The King’s Speech, to name one notable Oscar winner?