Review: Dear Comrades Takes on the Soviet System, Old-School Style

An account of a peaceful 1962 demonstration by workers at an Electromotive construction plant in Novocherkassk, Russia, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades begins with Lyudmila (Yuliya Vysotskaya), a Soviet official, heading to a local market to get ahead of the crush of shoppers looking to collect their weekly rations. Though she arrives early, a huge crowd has already gathered there, and Lyudmila pulls rank and walks straight to the backroom, where the clerk promptly assists her. The rapport between the two is chummy, even affectionate, but when the shopkeeper meekly asks about the rumors of looming food shortages, Lyudmila suddenly spouts furious, patriotic platitudes about the Soviet Union’s ability to provide for its people. Unwavering in her loyalty to the state, Lyudmila will not even entertain criticism of Stalin, whom she feels saw her people through the war.

The filmmakers patiently establish the story’s characters and political context, with Konchalovsky shooting Lyudmila’s daily routines in a spare, unadorned style, favoring meticulously angled static shots that create multiple frames of action. These complex framings subtly anticipate the depiction of the Soviet Union’s byzantine political system when Lyudmila arrives at a committee meeting that’s soon interrupted by the sound of an alarm indicating the strike’s eruption. As the committee members struggle to figure out what’s going on, they receive a call from Moscow officials informing them of the protest and demanding accountability. A handful of one-sided phone conversations establish that, somehow, the Kremlin has found out about the demonstration before the officials on the ground, which only exacerbates the local party members’ panic in trying to quash the uprising.

It’s in its depiction of the party’s response to the protest that Dear Comrades is at its most effective, soberly highlighting the absurdity of a nation born of a socialist revolution ultimately crafting the knottiest of bureaucracies known to man. Much of the film’s first half consists of committee heads being supplanted by newly arrived, higher-ranking officials, suggesting a reverse Matryoshka-doll effect as lower officials beget more powerful comrades, leading all the way to the top as an unseen Khrushchev takes an interest in quashing the uprising. This section of the film verges on the satirical, with a committee member thundering at one point, “A fucking strike in our socialist community. How is this possible?!” But Konchalovsky never plays up the comedy of all this finger-pointing, instead homing in on how easily a person like Lyudmila, who feels so secure in her regional power and her belief in the system, can suddenly find herself attempting to ward off liquidation by superiors.

Adding to the woman’s faltering faith is her witnessing of the subsequent army crackdown on the protests, in which two dozen people are killed and many more arrested and secreted away by the K.G.B. In a harrowing sequence, Konchalovsky shoots Lyudmila taking shelter inside of a barber shop with a radio that blares music that drowns out the sound of the carnage taking place outside as people stream past the windows with blood-streaked faces. Earlier, Lyudmila called for the arrest of every single protestor for disgracing the Soviet Union, but here she can only look on in absolute horror at the state’s brutal exercising of its power.

Unfortunately, the starkness that gives this scene, as well as the portentous leadup to it, its unnerving power loses its focus in the second half of Dear Comrades, during which Lyudmila has to navigate the potentially lethal pitfalls of internecine finger-pointing by panicked party members while also searching for her daughter, Svetka (Yulia Burova), who goes missing in the massacre. Despite the mother’s fraught search for her child, the film feels meandering and oddly emotionless in this stretch—perhaps a reflection of a system that by 1962 had long since taught its citizens to turn a blind eye to atrocity. Even so, the scenes of the woman heading to various outskirts and alleys quickly grow repetitive, and only the occasional nod toward the full horror that the Soviet system can foist on citizens deemed meddlesome punctuates a missing-person search that conspicuously lacks for urgency.

Only at the end, when the encroaching bleakness that threatened to swallow it whole dissipates into a moment of hope, does Dear Comrades deliver on its initial promise, albeit in a way wholly unlike anything else in the film. After two hours of austere, static framing, Dear Comrades turns into something more abstract. In the final shots, on a moonlit roof, it starts to resemble a classic Soviet film, reframing its realism through an array of theatrical, didactic flourishes. The characters aren’t shot at eye level, as has been the case for most of the film, but rather from low angles that position them as heroes of the state. The characters speak less conversationally and more declaratively, facing not each other but raising their heads to the sky and exclaiming to the unseen audience on the other side of the screen. That this channeling of golden-age Soviet cinema’s style is used to deliver an anti-Soviet polemic is a captivating bit of irony completely absent from anything in the film up to this point.