Dorogie tovarishchi!

Andrei Konchalovsky (2020)

A year after Agnieszka Holland’s Mr Jones, here’s another recreation of another brutal episode in the history of the Soviet Union.  The atrocity in Holland’s film, witnessed by her young Welsh title character, was the Stalin-made Holodomor famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s.  In Dear Comrades! the octogenarian Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky dramatises the Novocherkassk massacre of June 1962, from the perspective of the protagonist, Lyudmila ‘Lyuda’ Syomina (an invented character, unlike Gareth Jones).  The Holodomor killed millions.  The death toll in Novocherkassk, when Soviet soldiers and KGB operatives opened fire on unarmed protesters, was twenty-six[1].  But Dear Comrades! is an altogether bigger film than Mr Jones.

The action takes place in and around Novocherkassk over the course of four days, beginning on the eve of the shootings.  Konchalovsky (who wrote the screenplay with Elena Kiseleva) makes clear, in a succession of short scenes, that rising prices and diminishing food supplies are the talk of the town.  They’re the main topic of conversation between Lyuda (Julia Vysotskaya), a member of the City Committee, and her boss, Loginov (Vladislav Komarov), as she gets up from the bed they’ve been sharing.  (Loginov’s wife is due back home the following day but that’s the last we hear of her.  The  affair is quickly, and entirely, overtaken by events.)  Lyuda says she needs to get to the local store for provisions before they disappear.  On arrival there, she threads her way through a long queue, into a back room where a female store assistant produces a cache of various basic foods, along with special extras:  cigarettes for Lyuda’s elderly father; ‘chocolate curd bars’, her teenage daughter Svetka’s favourite.

Lyuda doesn’t take this privileged treatment for granted.  She offers the woman in return one of two pairs of pantyhose she recently managed to acquire.  Her tone changes sharply, though, when her benefactor laments the economic situation.  It seems obvious enough that a staunch Communist like Lyuda doesn’t want the Central Committee’s name taken in vain by those less committed to the system yet the rebuke is still striking.  In Loginov’s bed, Lyuda herself criticises the cost of living and food shortages:  her lover reminds her that the current situation will lead to ‘higher living standards in the nearest future’.  Lyuda’s flip-flop is the first example of what becomes a recurring feature of Dear Comrades!, and a convincing feature of the political allegiances it describes.  People change their tune according to where they are, who they’re talking to.

Along with milk and meat supplies, pay rates at the Novocherkassk Electromotive Building Factory (NEBF) have also declined while production quotas have increased.  The resulting industrial unrest is discussed at her own workplace and Lyuda is again hardline, disparaging the factory workers as ignorant criminals.  At home, she’s differently impatient with her father (Sergei Erlish), who glumly looks forward to death, and with her daughter (Yuliya Burova), for all manner of things.  Svetka is too questioning on political matters; besides, she won’t darn the holes in her socks or wear a bra, despite being well developed.  (How well developed is confirmed in an unnecessary full frontal of the girl as she emerges from behind a shower curtain.)  After an argument with her mother over the family’s evening meal, Svetka walks out of the apartment.  She hasn’t returned next morning when Lyuda leaves for work.  Within hours, the offices of the City Committee in the town square are under siege from protesters from the NEBF and elsewhere.  Armed forces arrive to disperse the demonstration.

The shooting that follows is the kinetic centre of Dear Comrades! and a startling piece of cinema.  Konchalovsky and his editors, Sergei Taraskin and Karolina Maciejewska, do well to convey the chaos of the situation.  People are shot and fall down but it’s unclear where the bullets are coming from.  There’ll be arguments to come over who did the more damage – troops on the ground or KGB snipers on rooftops.  She and her work colleagues are ushered from their building to a place of safety but Lyuda is soon in the thick of the mayhem:  she’s anxiously looking for Svetka, who she thinks may have been among the protesters.  The previous day, Lyuda went to the hairdresser’s in the square.  As Konchalovsky’s camera re-enters the salon, a shot through the plate glass window kills the woman who runs the place.  Lyuda helps another woman, with a leg wound, into the hairdresser’s, and onto a chair by the window.  Another bullet kills this woman, too.  A radio in the salon plays light music throughout the sequence.

The hint of satirical comedy in the title – and its exclamation mark – is reinforced by the script’s regular supply of apparatchik-speak.  The synergy between this and the horrifying events that unfold makes for a narrative as absurd as it is gripping.  Konchalovsky develops a tone that’s consistent but consistently disconcerting.  It’s remarkable, in view of the close-to-home subject matter, to see a Russian-made film manage this complex balancing act much more successfully than, for obvious example, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin.  Eager to toe the party line, Lyuda stands up in a meeting presided over by two Central Committee officers, sent to Novocherkassk on Kremlin orders; she urges an ‘extreme penalty’ for those inciting the protest.  Her intervention doesn’t go unnoticed.  Through Loginov, she’s asked by the Moscow visitors to put in writing the punitive measures she has in mind for troublemakers, one of whom may be the daughter that Lyuda is increasingly frantic to find.

Prior to the arrival of Khrushchev’s emissaries, Basov (Dmitry Kostyaev), a high-ranking official from elsewhere in the region, has been dispatched to Novocherkassk to sort things out.  He cluelessly addresses the crowd of protesters and gets a rock thrown at him.  Fat, sweaty Basov is the closest that Dear Comrades! gets to a comedy character, thanks to a combination of his appearance and his ridiculous behaviour.  KGB man Viktor (Andrey Gusev) is a more ambiguous and intriguing creation.  He’s taken by surprise by the killings.  Viktor, who thought the soldiers would be firing dummy ammunition, seems not to have known in advance that KGB agents would also be involved.  The following day, he reports to a superior that the heat of the blood that splattered the asphalt in the town square has made it impossible to remove.  He doesn’t argue with the instruction from the other end of the phone line – to put down another layer of asphalt to cover the bloodstains.  Soon afterwards, Viktor arrives at Lyuda’s apartment with a search warrant.  He, for different reasons, is also looking for her daughter.

The second half of Dear Comrades! largely comprises the hunt for Svetka, which Lyuda and Viktor carry out together.  He’s drawn to, and soon determined to help Lyuda rather than bring Svetka to book but he still makes use of his KGB credentials to assist the process.  A search for a missing child, in conjunction with Viktor’s shifting feelings, might seem to suggest the film turns into more conventional human drama yet it doesn’t.  Konchalovsky, rather, continues to illustrate the clash of Lyuda’s mother love and political loyalties, and shows Viktor’s personal and professional impulses operating in parallel.  Lyuda discovers some of the corpses from the massacre didn’t end up in the hospital morgue that she visited.  Instead, they were transported outside the city for disposal.  In the cemetery where the bodies were dumped in unmarked graves, the man responsible, in reply to Lyuda’s urgent questions, recalls that they included the body of a girl.  Unprompted, he also remembers there were holes in the toes of her socks.  Lyuda’s distraught reaction is memorable but so too is Viktor’s quiet response to her – that it’s right and proper for these dead people to be forgotten.  Even feeling sympathy for Lyuda, Viktor knows what view a man in his position should have of the matter, and is prepared to voice it.

Konchalovsky’s visual and musical choices give Dear Comrades! a sense of unvarnished reality.    Andrey Naydenov’s monochrome cinematography, apt for a story set in the era of black-and-white television news, serves as a means of underlining that the core event of the film actually happened.  The images are contained in a square frame that buttresses the narrative’s matter-of-factness.  A fragment of the Russian national anthem is heard during the brief opening titles; a choir sings during the more extended closing ones.  In between, as well as the music coming from TVs or radios, a band tunes up outside the venue for a dance event, hurriedly arranged by the authorities to distract from the previous day’s bloodshed.  As they drive along in his car, Viktor, who belongs to a choir, and Lyuda sing the words of a patriotic song, with powerfully mixed feelings.  But Konchalovsky eschews the use of a dramatic score to interpret what’s happening on the screen or shape reactions to it.

His expedition with Lyuda over, Viktor drops her outside her block.  She enters the apartment to learn from her father that her daughter has returned home unscathed.  Like the earlier quest to find the girl, this sounds like a familiar device – a last-minute twist that delivers an against-all-odds happy ending – but the effect is more complex:  the finale is rich in uncertainty and ambivalence.  Svetka is terrified of what’s going to happen to an agitator like her.  Viktor leaves the film wrongly assuming she’s dead.  Lyuda has experienced the ordeal of assuming the same – and the closing reunion is too brief to expunge the emotional weight of her accumulating despair over more than an hour of screen time.  The viewer is left full of how it felt that the mother had lost her daughter, even though it turns out she hasn’t.

All the main actors are highly effective; lean, fair-haired Julia Vysotskaya is – as the story demands she should be – outstanding.  (Born in Novocherkassk in 1973, Vysotskaya is married to Andrei Konchalovsky, thirty-six years her senior.)  It’s plain to see why men are attracted to (the widowed?) Lyuda and her charisma, though continuously subjugated to the urgency of her predicament, is always part of the atmosphere.  But Vysotskaya realises especially well the collisions between Lyuda’s confident political spiel and her unbidden, disruptive displays of emotion.   People in Dear Comrades! tend to look back to better times.  A nurse in World War II, Lyuda regrets the passing of the Stalin regime while her father is nostalgic for his Cossack upbringing and youth.  (He has put on his old Cossack tunic when Viktor calls at the apartment.  ‘Grandpa’s just fooling around,’ Lyuda nervously assures their visitor.)  In contrast, the film’s closing words are about looking forward.  Clutching her weeping daughter, Lyuda insists, ‘We will do better’.  Is this a vow to improve her relationship with Svetka or a pious hope for the future of the USSR?   Perhaps it’s both.  At any rate, Konchalovsky’s film does a fine job of dramatising political versus personal conflicts and confusion.

21 January 2021

[1] This is the official figure.  According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, ‘Information from a variety of sources is more or less unanimous that some seventy or eighty people were killed’.