Dear Comrades Movie Review
Director: Andrei Konchalovsky
Cast: Julia Vysotskaya, Andrei Guseve, Yulia Burova, Sergei Erlish, Vlaislav Komarov
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 1/28/21
Opens: January 29, 2021 in virtual cinema. February 5, 2021 streaming
Not only political candidates, but whole countries embarking on a new system of government promise the world in poetry and then govern in prose. In the U.S., a middle-class revolution beginning in 1776 seemed to guarantee that our nation would be the shining city on the hill, but slavery, the Civil War, and countless brutal and unnecessary wars of our various administrations in Washington belie those ideals. So it was with the Soviet Union.
Save this story for later.
Andrei Konchalovskyâs âDear Comrades!,â Russiaâs 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: âFrom 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.â
Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Dear Comrades!” dramatizes the deadly events of June 2, 1962, when Soviet government forces fired into a crowd of unarmed protesters in the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk.
Konchalovsky; written by Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva
Dear Comrades, the Russian entry for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards, addresses one of the most significant and least understood episodes in the history of the Soviet Union: the massacre of dozens of workers in Novocherkassk on June 2, 1962, on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
Twenty-six people are believed to have been killed in the incident (other estimates go far higher), but the real number was never established and perhaps never will be. Seven young workers were accused of “banditry” and executed, while dozens more were sent to labor camps for many years. Most were not rehabilitated until the dissolution of the USSR.