121 min | NR | January 29, 2021 | Neon
Lyuda Semina believes in Stalin, the Party, and the workers’ paradise. Then the army opens fire on striking workers in her town and her daughter vanishes into the bodies. The system she worships hands her the bill.
Lyudmila Semina is a mid-level Communist party official in the industrial town of Novocherkassk in 1962. She believes in Stalin, in the Party, and in the promise that the Soviet system delivers for its workers. When the laborers at the local locomotive plant strike over wage cuts and rising prices, the state answers with soldiers and bullets. Andrei Konchalovsky stages the Novocherkassk massacre and then follows one woman as the ideology she worships turns its guns on the people it claims to serve. The film is about what happens when a true believer is forced to choose between her faith and her daughter.
Yuliya Vysotskaya plays Lyuda as a woman armored in certainty. She demands the harshest punishment for the strikers in the Party meeting and recites the old Stalinist slogans without a flicker of doubt. Vysotskaya lets that armor crack one piece at a time, never all at once, as Lyuda moves through the morgues and hospitals searching for her missing daughter. Sergei Erlish plays Lyuda’s elderly father, an old Cossack who remembers the world before the Bolsheviks, and he delivers the film’s sharpest indictment from his bed in a single hushed monologue. Yulia Burova plays the daughter Svetka with the restless contempt of a younger generation that has stopped reciting the catechism.
Konchalovsky directs and co-writes with Elena Kiseleva, and the two of them refuse the easy comforts of the period drama. The film is black and white and boxed into the near-square Academy frame, which presses the propaganda posters and the Lenin portraits right up against the bodies in the street. Konchalovsky shoots the massacre at a cold remove, often holding the camera back and letting the violence happen in the corners of the frame. There is no swelling score to tell you how to feel about the killing. The cover-up that follows, with its bulldozers and forged paperwork, plays out in the same flat, documentary light as the slogans that opened the film.
Dear Comrades! works because it never lets Lyuda off the hook and never reduces her to a monster. She is a believer who wants the boot to come down, right up until the boot comes down on her own child. Konchalovsky uses one family to show how a state convinces decent people to demand their own destruction. The black-and-white austerity is not nostalgia. It is the film stripping the era down to the machinery of fear and the people caught inside it.