Dear Comrades! (Andrei Konchalovsky, 2020) (Patreon)

With the exception of his brother Nikita Mikhalkov, Andrei Konchalovsky may be the most well-connected filmmaker in Russia. This may be irrelevant in evaluating his new film Dear Comrades! But one of the things that is rather irksome about this film is its absolute confidence. In dramatizing the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre -- during which Russian auto employees went on strike to protest economic austerity and were fired upon by the Army -- Konchalovsky virtually eliminates any subtlety or artistic questioning about the event, resulting in a film that is firm in its ideological footing. 

The massacre occurred during Khrushchev's premiership, and this period of Soviet history is so unproblematically rejected by the current regime that there is no danger whatsoever in Konchalovsky's protest film. High dudgeon is evident throughout, and while this is certainly an appropriate response to the massacre itself, it's hard not to perceive this kind of historical excavation as a bit self-congratulatory. No one is really allowed to address the abuses of the current Putin era, so reminding us that the U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian regime feels like artistic whataboutism.

I might feel more generous about the nature of the project if Dear Comrades! were especially interesting as a film. But with its black-and-white "period" cinematography, fast pace and fixation of a central character amidst the larger movements of history, Dear Comrades! operates like a conventional studio film, gussied up with the art-film trappings that signify Oscar-bait. (Russia has indeed submitted it as this year's Foreign Language nominee.) While Konchalovsky has faithfully recreated troop maneuvers, dark Politburo meetings, and claustrophobic atmosphere of the Soviet state, he also believes that the best way to tell this story is through one benighted character and her political awakening.

Lyuda (Konch regular Julia Vysotskaya) is a loyal functionary who fervently believes in Soviet Communism, although she is secretly not so sure about this Khrushchev guy. She pines for the grand days of the Stalin regime, when the nation was strong and everyone knew their place. Upon learning of the workers' uprising in her home town of Novocherkassk, she openly states at an official meeting that the Army should move in on the strikers, showing them no mercy. (Officials higher up, and the military brass, want a more peaceful solution.) But Lyuda finds herself regretting that directive once she discovers that her daughter Svetka (Yuliya Burova) was among the protesters in the square.

So much of the rest of the film is about following Lyuda, along with her lover Loginov (Vladislav Komarov), a mid-rank agent in the KGB, as they search frantically for Svetka, even challenging the imposed blockade of the city and their enforced secrecy agreements regarding what happened in Novocherkassk. In very direct terms, Konchalovsky shows us the breakdown of a bureaucrat, a true believer who now curses the Soviet state and all it stands for. Meanwhile, the larger ramifications of the massacre fade into the distance.

Operating on the basis of stereotype, Dear Comrades! insists that only a woman, driven by a mother's love, could understand the inhumanity of the Soviet period. Aside from Loginov, the men around her are by turns officious and craven, not willing to risk running afoul of the Kremlin or the KGB. What's more, the resolution of the film's central conflict -- the fate of Svetka -- is dealt with in a cynical, dishonest manner, as though Konchalovsky wanted to put the viewer through a wringer and then reward him or her with unearned relief.

At several points in the film, Soviet functionaries make an offhanded remark. "You know the Don basin is always trouble," or "that's the way it goes in the Don basin." If these statements represent Konchalovsky's attempt at subversive commentary on current affairs, they fail on that score. Instead, they only point up the overall pointlessness of Dear Comrades! Why acknowledge the troubled present, if not to implicitly ask for a pat on the head from the anti-Putin intelligentsia? Meanwhile, the rest of the film is a kind of apologia for the current state of affairs, a brief consideration of Soviet tyranny that ends on a positive note: this too shall pass.