Dear Comrades – Dorogie tovarishchi (2020)

Directed by: Andrey Konchalovskiy | 116 minutes | drama, history | Actors: Yuliya Vysotskaya, Vladislav Komarov, Andrey Gusev, Yuliya Burova, Sergei Erlish, Alexander Maskelyne

The Soviet Union, 1962. The era in ‘Dear Comrades’ is somewhat reminiscent of the European film of the time, with women in floral dresses, dusty butchers in doorways and fiery dining table scenes. Stylistically successful. There is also a summery optimism, no doubt thanks to the Khrushchev Doctrine, which even openly dealt with Stalinism (1924-1953). The ‘Khrushchev Thaw’ reduced repression and terror, although demonstrating was still not done in the Soviet Union.

Demonstrations and strikes had to be kept hidden from the outside world. The workers’ strike of the southern Russian Novocherkassk in 1962 was therefore violently suppressed, which is shown in a realistic way. The everyday scene of ordinary citizens with vegetable carts being hit unintentionally; a woman who takes refuge in a hairdressing salon and dies by a stray bullet: it is the arbitrariness that makes the impression.

No Hollywood drama with featured heroes, but average people who fall like dominoes. You and I in Russia in the early sixties: an overexposed black-and-white film, as if it were restored archive material. Another strong point is the sharp focus on the main character, a woman with a timeless character. Which can also be said of the actress. Lead actor Yuliya Vysotskaya was born in 1972 in Novocherkassk, and says she knew little about the drama before she started this film.

Vysotskaya plays with proper despair a Soviet bureaucrat whose daughter goes missing after the demonstration. It doesn’t make much sense to spoiler the sequel, the local color remains on the retina. The local communists meet as envoys of Boer Koekoek. Unintentionally funny, but indicative of the power implosion at the end of the century. Soviet communism was a totalitarian system that could flourish only because of the dictatorship, but was in danger of falling apart without a strict leadership. And so it happened, without looking at the victims.