Mark Reviews Movies: DEAR COMRADES!

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 24, 2020

It's not surprising that people in the Soviet Union would have protested the supposedly communist government's failings toward the people, that the government the same government would have opened fire on that crowd of protestors, or that there would have been a massive cover-up of both the protests and the government's lethal actions. All of this did happen in the city of Novocherkassk in 1962 (and in other places at other times, for sure), a massacre that's dramatized in Dear Comrades! from co-writer/director Andrey Konchalovskiy.

It's horrifying, obviously, to see the violence unfold, even in the film's stark black-and-white cinematography, but it's arguably more terrifying to watch the cold, calculated efficacy of the ensuing cover-up. We see government workers trying to wash the blood from the streets with firehoses. Shortly after, someone tells a Party official that the water isn't working. It was too hot on this particular day in June, so the blood baked into the asphalt. The official has a simple solution: Just pave new asphalt over the bloodstained patches.

Konchalovskiy's approach to this story is as detached and mostly emotionless as that official. That's why the film is as frighteningly effective as it is. We're not just watching the massacre and the decision-making processes of hiding that truth. The filmmaker, by sticking to the facts and the merciless forward motion of a secrecy scheme, gives us a sense of the mindset of these government officials, who gave up on actually being for the good of the people a long time ago and now just want to make sure the illusions—and, more importantly, their positions—are protected.

Just about every scene in the film, written by Konchalovskiy and Elena Kiseleva, is seen from the perspective of or is defined by the presence of some government lackey. The through line follows Lyuda (Yuilya Vysotskaya), a local Party official in Novocherkassk, who lives with her daughter Svetka (Yuliya Burova), a 19-year-old factory worker, and her father (played by Sergei Erlish), a cynical old man—and rightly so—who has seen and heard about such horrors during his life that he can't wait for death to end the misery.

The father wears his old Cossack uniform around the apartment, because he doesn't care if anyone notices, and Svetka has an attitude that the worker should be treated well. Lyuda slaps her daughter when the young woman puts too fine a point on that belief.

Lyuda is a Party loyalist—above the worker and above anyone else, really, even the old leaders who were once revered. That loyalty is tested more and more when a workers strike erupts at one of the city's factories. The government has raised prices on food, and the factory has decreased the workers' wages. The workers protest and then march toward the Party headquarters, throwing rocks through the windows.

Somewhere, officials debate using the army to quell the protests and whether or not to give the soldiers live ammunition. The orders are for both. Communications in and out of the city are blocked. The KGB starts tapping phones, and on her way out of the building, Lyuda sees one agent going to the roof with a sniper rifle.

The resulting massacre is portrayed as a confusing, bloody horror. Soldiers fire into the air, and moments later and in the distance away from the crowd, a bystander simply collapses to the ground. A woman in a salon is cleaning up, listening to the radio, and suddenly, the glass of the front window pops. She falls, convulsing in a spreading pool of her own blood.

More and more people suffer the same fate, either struck by a falling bullet from the soldiers' rifles or hit with deadly precision by the snipers hiding within the headquarters. We don't and can't know for sure, and that's the terrifying thing about the sequence.

Lyuda and her comrades safely sit in a park, until Lyuda realizes what's happening. She saves one woman, only for the shock of an explosion of blood to end the rescue. Then, there's the really important matter for Lyuda: The factory where her daughter works joined in the protest. When Lyuda returns home, the daughter isn't there, and the neighbors, who know strikers and protestors are being rounded up, aren't saying a word.

The rest of the story follows the cover-up, as the government looks for someone to blame and the various branches (the army and the KGB, mainly) fight to push the blame on each other, and Lyuda's attempts to find Svetka, with the help of a seemingly sympathetic KGB agent named Viktor (Andrei Gusev), who claims to be as in the dark as her. Konchalovskiy mostly retains that objective perspective on the cruel progression of the government cover-up, seeing the square where an unknown number of people were just killed or wounded being transformed into a space for a local dance.

Lyuda isn't quite the conscience of the story, since she only cares about the consequences of the massacre because it might have affected her. She does, though, develop something of a conscience, as she sees the morgue piled with bodies, witnesses nurses being hauled to prison for unwittingly saying the wrong thing, and discovers the government's plans to callously dispose of the evidence.

The personal story at the heart of Dear Comrades! may not be quite as affecting as the filmmakers believe it to be, although Vysotskaya's portrayal of Lyuda's moral transformation is subtly, precisely progressive. It's the film's tone, unwavering in showing and reflecting the indifference of how these people crush even a hint of opposition and the truth, that truly terrifies and haunts.

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