James R | On 16, Jan 2021

Director: Andrei Konchalovsky
Cast: Yuliya Vysotskaya, Andrey Gusev, Vladislav Komarov
Certificate: TBC
Watch Dear Comrades online in the UK: Curzon Home Cinema / Apple TV (iTunes) / Virgin Movies / Google Play / CHILI

Comrade. A colleague or a fellow member of an organisation. A partner, a companion or some other person considered your equal. That the word was the go-to term for members of the Soviet Union was only natural – it immediately conjured up a sense of solidarity between communist citizens. Everyone was all in it together. Except, of course, everyone wasn’t, and that inequality became a devastating tinderbox in 1962, when a massacre in Novocherkassk killed at least 26 protestors.

The protests emerged at an electrical power plant, where the workers have decided they’ve had enough of falling wages and rising food prices. The government responded by sending in armed troops, and they shot 26 of them dead and injured another 87 (several of whom later died).

Director Andrei Konchalovsky retells these atrocities with a horrifying realism – and a focused, clinical anger. Our window on to events is Lyuda (Yuliya Vysotskaya), who finds herself in the middle of the massacre as the city is torn apart. She later discovers that her daughter is missing – and, fearing the worst, she begins a determined search to uncover what happened to her, just as the authorities begin a crackdown on any ensuing unrest, demanding people sign NDAs so that everyone might eventually forget about the whole thing.

Konchalovsky captures all of this in a crisp, detailed monochrome, with his academy ratio echoing the oppressive hush that seeps through every scene. (There’s no musical score to bring emotion to events; the atmosphere and people are charged enough.) There’s almost a humour to the farcical mayhem of the officials trying to work out how to solve the chaotic bloodbath, with nobody wanting to carry the buck. But there’s also an unnerving resonance to the whole affair as, like HBO’s Chernobyl, we witness what happens when people in power choose to cover something up.

Where another filmmaker might make Lyuda a strong opponent of the nation’s rulers, Konchalovsky and co-writer Elena Kiseleva make it clear that Lyuda is actually more patriotic than most. She’s an official on the town committee and her grumbles about the challenges of everyday life are rooted in her nostalgic affection for Stalin, when she believes times were good and conditions were fairer.

That ambiguity and internal conflict bring a thought-provoking heft to this portrait of a corrupt regime. Lyuda, we learn early on, is sleeping with her superior, and finds an unexpected ally in the KGB agent (Vladislav Komarov) she recruits to help with her hunt – this is a film that has compassion for the humanity of its characters, even as it stokes righteous indignation at the authorities who showed no compassion to their subjects.

The title of the film hints at this dark irony, amplified by the national anthem-like song that Lyuda keeps finding herself singing. Yuliya Vysotskaya delivers a flawless performance; while she is traumatised and shocked by what she witnesses, Lyuda nonetheless maintains a calm poker-faced exterior that makes us wonder whether she’ll just turn her daughter in if and when she does find her. Because no matter what, part of her still clings to a days-gone-by hope that things can improve in the future – even as her country tries to erase its history, condemning humanity to repeat it.

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