Dysfunctions
“Dear Comrades!” Is the Story of Two Russian Families and a Century of Terror
By Masha Gessen, New Yorker, February 27, 2021
Mar 1, 2021 - 12:05:01 PM

Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Dear Comrades!,” Russia’s entry this year for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (streaming on Hulu), opens with the chords of the Russian national anthem. The director was five or six years old when his father, Sergei Mikhalkov, first co-wrote the lyrics for the anthem, which included praise for Lenin and Stalin. Decades later, Mikhalkov rewrote the lyrics to remove Stalin, and, in 2000, immediately after Vladimir Putin became President, Mikhalkov, then in his eighties, rewrote the lyrics yet again, omitting Lenin and, for the first time, invoking a supreme deity rather than a cult of personality: “From the southern seas to the polar edge / Our forests and fields have stretched. / You are the only one in the world! The only one like this / Our native land, protected by God.”

Mikhalkov, known primarily as a children’s poet, was one of the country’s most decorated writers; every child in a country run by state terror could recite chunks of his series of poems about a friendly policeman named Uncle Styopa. He was a member of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal legislative governing body of the U.S.S.R. Both of his sons became film directors, their careers accelerated by the father’s high standing—having such a well-connected father could mean access to film stock and studio space and smooth passage through the convoluted bureaucracy of funding and censorship. But Andrei changed his last name to his mother’s maiden name, and, in 1980, left the Soviet Union and moved to Hollywood. It was the ultimate act of rebellion, if not betrayal, for a scion of a nomenklatura family.

Every Russian family has a story worthy of a gnarly Russian novel, not because Russians are so twisted, but because twentieth-century Russian terror worked by slicing through all bonds. Every family has its victims and its executioners. Conversely, every story of Russian history, including “Dear Comrades!,” is a story about families. The film depicts events from 1962, when the southern Russian industrial city of Novocherkassk erupted in protest against the government’s decision to raise consumer prices. Government forces opened fire on the protesters, killing more than twenty-five and wounding more than eighty-five. Seven people were later executed, and more than a hundred were imprisoned, for allegedly inciting the protests.

The family at the center of “Dear Comrades!” includes three generations. Lyuda Syomina (Julia Vysotskaya) is a local party functionary in Novocherkassk. She lives with her grizzled father (Sergei Erlish), who seems never to leave the apartment, and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Svetka (Yulia Burova). Lyuda waxes nostalgic: if Stalin were still around, prices would be going down rather than up. When workers in the city go on strike, Lyuda calls for arrests and executions. But Svetka is among the protesters, and, in his housebound way, so is Lyuda’s father. As soon as he gets word of the protests, he extracts an old chest with the artifacts of his former life: a Cossack uniform, an Orthodox icon, and some letters. He reads a letter out loud to his daughter:

They’ve killed Uncle Timofey, too. They’ve killed a bunch of people. They’ve thrown naked bodies onto carts any which way. Some people’s arms were hanging all the way down to the ground, and some people’s legs. Uncle Timofey’s leg was hitched up. Shameful.

I went to the school, but they told me I don’t deserve to get an education from the Soviet government because my father died fighting them. So I go there rarely now, but I’m not too worried about that, because all they do at school these days is propaganda and heresy. We got a house visit from the activists, who took the last of the corn and fined us on top. Mama says we are going to have to die of hunger, because many people already have, and not just here, in Shumilinskaya, but in all the places where Cossacks have been living.

The letter is from his niece, Lyuda’s first cousin. By the time that the old man received it, she and her mother were dead. This happened forty years earlier, when Lyuda was a baby; it’s family history she never knew.

In the present, Svetka has disappeared. Lyuda looks for her everywhere: at a friend’s apartment, in the hospital, in the morgue. Finally, Viktor (Andrei Gusev), a senior K.G.B. officer, drives her outside the besieged city to look for her daughter. They are searching for a girl who they presume has died protesting the decisions of the party that Lyuda represents, at the hands of troops that Viktor and his colleagues command. They appear to find Svetka’s burial place, a stranger’s untended grave to which her body was added under cover of darkness. As they drive back, Lyuda asks, “How will I go to her? Where is she? How will I go to her?” Viktor responds, “You can’t be remembering. You can’t be talking about it. That’s why you signed a nondisclosure pledge.”
Video From The New Yorker
Searching for My Long-Lost Grandmother

Soviet citizens were ordered to obliterate their own memory. Unlike her father, Lyuda would have no letters to keep, no words to hide: as Konchalovsky shows, she already has no way of speaking about what she has seen, lost, and felt. Halfway through the movie, before the graveyard scene, Lyuda, shell-shocked from what she has seen in the streets, is in her apartment. A Soviet movie called “The Spring” is on television, specifically a musical number called “The Spring March.” Women in identical white dresses parade down a street, singing, “Comrade, comrade, / In labor and in battle, / Guard your fatherland / With total devotion.” The lyrics were written by Sergei Mikhalkov.

When Viktor and Lyuda are driving back to the city, having made their gruesome discovery, she starts singing. “Comrade, comrade . . . ” she begins. She can’t get the song out of her head. Viktor picks up the tune. They sing beautifully together. At this moment, they cannot possibly believe a word they are singing, but they have no other words. They return to a city that has literally paved over the bloody square where dozens of people were killed and wounded. At home, Lyuda discovers that her daughter is alive—terrified, cornered, facing an apparently inevitable prison sentence, but alive. Lyuda holds her daughter and reassures her desperately: “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right. We’ll become better. We’ll become better.” We know she means it. We also know she means that she wishes Stalin, or Stalinism, would return. The movie ends with “The Spring March.”

Novocherkassk was small enough, the uprising large enough, and the number of casualties high enough that the entire city must have been aware of what had happened. Still, the Soviet regime succeeded in suppressing any public discussion of the protests and the executions. I heard about them for the first time in the early nineteen-nineties. I was interviewing a young gender-studies scholar in Moscow, and she proudly said that she hailed from Novocherkassk, the city where the only anti-government protests of the post-war era had occurred. She had been a baby at the time of the protests, but she told me about them, and the executions, in some detail. This story stuck in my memory. Reading my colleague Anthony Lane’s review of “Dear Comrades!,” I realized that the Novocherkassk protests are described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” which was published in 1973, and which I read long before that interview. But I had no mental map and no historical context to which to affix this knowledge, so I didn’t remember it.

Konchalovsky has said that he first heard about the Novocherkassk protests at the time they happened, from someone who was working alongside him at Mosfilm. Then he went out drinking and forgot about it for roughly thirty years. In the early nineteen-nineties, he read about the Novocherkassk events in the media. Years later, it occurred to him to cast his wife, Vysotskaya, in a tragedy, and he remembered Novocherkassk again. Vysotskaya herself was born in Novocherkassk, more than ten years after the protests. She went to college and became an actress in Belarus, where, just as “Dear Comrades!” was released, popular protests were being crushed as brutally as they were in Novocherkassk nearly sixty years ago.

Even now, when it’s possible to tell the story of the Novocherkassk protests, Konchalovsky chooses to tell it from the point of view of the nomenklatura. It’s an advantageous vantage point: as disoriented and shocked as Party leaders are shown to be in the movie, they knew more than did ordinary protesters and onlookers. Konchalovsky has said that half the script was lifted from transcripts of Party meetings. It’s the other half—the private world of Lyuda’s family and the private terror of her search—that are imagined. Konchalovsky made the movie with the support of Russia 1, one of Russia’s dominant state-controlled television networks; his younger brother, the head of the cinematographers’ union and a member of the country’s Oscar-selection committee; and the billionaire Alisher Usmanov, whose special mission is ensuring Putin’s domination over the information sphere. Money and access continue to accrue to the son of a state poet, and this, too, is a function of family history and the history of Russia.