When in the first frame the heroine gets out of her lover’s bed in the morning in a negligee, it’s almost Hollywood. White curls, black underwear, legs, chest – everything we love. But we live in Russia. Five minutes later, on the street, this is already a dilapidated Soviet aunt with wallets and a sweeping step. In another ten, a preoccupied businesswoman with a fresh haircut.
For two hours of screen time, city committee official Lyudmila Semina (Yulia Vysotskaya) – a former front-line nurse, daughter of a Cossack, a quarrelsome single mother – will survive the three-day Novocherkassk uprising of 1962 and several terrible days after it, when the authorities begin to hard concrete the traces of the mass execution of demonstrators. In a frantic search for her 18-year-old daughter, who has sunk into the elements of rebellion, Lyudmila will descend into the kingdom of the dead – the world of morgues, graveyards, mass graves. She will begin to understand something, but she will not understand anything, she will begin to see clearly, go blind, die and be reborn again. In the finale, this party Demeter will rise to her full height under the starry sky and, with an unexpected Chekhovian sob, will promise to “get better.”
Before us is one of the most beautiful creations of Andron Konchalovsky – the heir to Italian neorealism and the singer of a Russian woman, and at the same time, by family contract, the Russian idea. There is no doubt that the Oscar-nominated Dear Comrades! will be read by the Western audience not only as an artistic and historical study, but above all as an anti-Soviet manifesto. With the Russian audience it will be more difficult. First, he quickly considers the author’s sympathies. Secondly, he will turn on the fact inspector and watch a big drama, comparing the realities known to him with their interpretations on the screen.
Why not compare? The Novocherkassk execution was one of the most discussed crimes of the authorities in perestroika, which were “hidden from us.” The disclosure of the documents became a sensation. Hundreds of publications and a good half of the good series “Once Upon a Time in Rostov” are devoted to this story.
Konchalovsky, who made his film in the aesthetics of black-and-white documentary cinema, reproduces events with visible reverence for facts. The setting and details are excellent. However, the suspicion of manipulation arises already where they talk about the unprecedented nature of the protest. But the early sixties were an era of powerful social electricity, where several indignant currents converged at once: dissatisfaction with the monetary reform, which turned into a devaluation, day by day the deteriorating diet and an acute shortage of manufactured goods, rampant criminality, growing anti-nomenclature and anti-police sentiments. The authorities demanded that workers work more, earn less and eat less. This could not but cause a murmur, at times turning into open rebellion.
Only in 1960-1962. on the territory of the USSR, according to the historian Vladimir Kozlov, 34,000 “anonymous anti-Soviet documents” were recorded, the KGB exposed 107 “anti-Soviet groups”, and in leaflets – some of them flew along Gorky Street – they wrote directly: “Down with Khrushchev’s dictatorship!” One 1961 was remembered at once by five riots in different cities. However, in the tape “Dear comrades!” the uprising of the workers of the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant is presented as something unheard of, hitherto unseen. Meanwhile, the Novocherkassk case was unheard of only in terms of the brutality of the suppression (caused more by the incompetence of the security forces than by the desire for a lot of blood). It was part of a short Soviet renaissance, a phenomenon in a long line, and not a one-time failure of the system.
If anything needs to be destroyed in the current public consciousness, it is the myth of the downtrodden non-resistance Soviet people, obediently eating any cannibalistic initiatives. And the myth of the solidity of the Soviet security forces also needs to be revised. The film really gapes with the brilliant absence of the main figure – Lieutenant General Matvey Shaposhnikov, deputy commander of the North Caucasus Military District. It was he who refused to fire tanks at the crowd of rebels. He said the historic phrase: “I don’t see an enemy in front of me,” for which he was immediately dismissed. Subsequently, he wrote letters to the Central Committee, demanding an investigation into the Novocherkassk case. The path is glorious, the name is loud, but, alas, it is not in the film.
Yes, it is not worth studying history according to Konchalovsky. But the film “Dear Comrades!” interesting as another approach to heavy weight – the phenomenon of homo soveticus. That is, to that bad good Soviet man, in whom liveliness of mind was consistently combined with clanging demagogy, personal courage – with great conformity, everyday puritanism – with cheerful sexual looseness, and messianism and faith in enlightenment (“we explained little to the people …” ) – with confidence in the right to a nomenclature sausage and candy ration. Konchalovsky explores not the crowd and not the power itself, but the man of the near-power orbit, the “staff”, with one foot standing in his native barracks, the other in the bossy baroque.
The fair-haired Lyudmila Danilovna consists of these dichotomies, not that very complex, but interesting. And everything would have been quite plausible if she hadn’t been pinned, like a thistle on a hat, Stalinism of the most ingenuous, grass-roots pouring, the tireless slogan “there was no such thing under Stalin”, clumsy, like a sailor’s longing. The complex and flexible nature of the heroine does not fit well with primitive ideologemes (“everything was clear at the front”, “there was order under Stalin”). However, to be true to historical truth, after the 20th Congress – “the cult of personality is spattered with mud!” – wore other dresses. It was a return to Leninist ideals and a search for genuine socialism. Nostalgia for the father of nations arose much later. For the reincarnation of the sweet image of “order” and “greatness” the people needed to work up Brezhnev’s stagnant fat. It is tempting, of course, to explain this thistle in the spirit of Boris Chichibabin: “As long as there is poverty and wealth, until we stop lying and wean ourselves from being afraid, Stalin will not die” (1959). That is, as a nationwide moral corruption, ingrained in the pores of the Gulag ethics and morals. However, no.
Most likely, Konchalovsky’s heroine “with Stalin in her heart” is just a badge of an export film statement, a universal counter-mark to the world of big cinema. How, in fact, to tell the not very historically savvy world about the national tragedy of sixty years ago, without including identification marks-stamps? Without these propriety, it would be a complicated existential movie. With decency, a premium movie came out.
This is distressing, because in everything else, “Dear comrades!” and really beautiful and fine work. Julia Vysotskaya shows herself as a great dramatic actress: complex intonations, unexpected colors and transitions, great spiritual strength. Sergey Erlish is also amazing (this is his first acting experience) in the role of the father of the heroine, a veteran of the First World War, who has preserved the family icon, a soldier’s uniform and a set of St. George’s crosses. His kitchen monologues lead the heroine into the world of another tragedy – tribal and estate. Aleksey Gusev is also very good in the role of a KGB officer with a human face and an admirer of Lyudmila.
With them, the Cannes Film Festival has already been taken, now there is a reason to cheer for the film at the Oscars.