When Putin was re-elected in 2018, Andrei Konchalovsky, director of Dear Comrades—the acclaimed historical drama about an atrocity erased from history during the Soviet era—spoke on RT of his “extraordinary joy” (though he sounded dutiful rather than giddy). Putin’s win, per Konchalovsky, was proof Russia was “going the right way.” I didn’t see his election spin on RT until after I’d watched Dear Comrades so it was a shock to hear him express disdain for the “fuss” made by Putin’s “paranoiac” critics since his film about the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre limns what happens in a country where no-one’s allowed to disturb powers-that-be.
Dear Comrades’ anti-heroine, Liuda, is a local political functionary who means to be a stalwart Communist, though she crosses the line in the opening scene when she asks her married lover why prices keep going up if the Soviet Union is, as Party Secretary Khrushchev insists, on the edge of Red Plenty. Her lover (who’s also her boss) reminds her she gets a break at the deli because she’s a Party member and spells out the quid pro quo: “You get the rations, so you wouldn’t ask questions.” But that equation stops adding up for her once she witnesses a killing spree in her provincial city. The film reenacts how Russian troops and KGB murdered dozens of striking factory workers who had assembled in the center of Novocherkassk after taking over a Party office (where the workers were outraged to find “cognac and Hungarian salami”). The Party covered up the killings, burying bodies in unmarked graves (and denying anyone had gone on strike in the Workers’ State). But KGB imperatives—“These people have to be forgotten.”—are lost on Liuda since her daughter, who was with the strikers, has gone missing. Liuda is launched on a harrowing trip reminiscent in some ways of the parental-is-political journey in Costa-Gavras’ film Missing, only this time “the parent searching for their child bears actual culpability for their disappearance.”[1]
Liuda is played by actress Yuliya Vysotskaya (who is married to Konchalovsky). Unhammy as Jack Lemon in Missing, she never hits a false note as her character loses faith in Communism and turns into a self-lacerating apostate. The other comrades aren’t as fluid as Liuda, but they aren’t stock figures. The differences among them hint at the range of personalities on the wrong side of history. There are whiners and ranters, letches and drunks, climbers and time-servers, singing KGB men and conflicted army officers, including one who tries to undo orders that prep soldiers to fire on protestors and another who tells a stranger about his role in State executions. (On the verge of unravelling, this military man recalls how he bound prisoners’ hands before shooting them in the head: “I bet I could tie [the knot] with my eyes closed.”)
Having learned, though, that Konchalovsky is careful around Putin’s minions, I’m struck by what’s missing from Dear Comrades’ gallery of commies. Where are the scariest monsters? And, while we’re on the subject of the guiltiest, who’s doing the shooting when the killing starts? (Random bullets come out of nowhere to strike down protestors and bystanders.)
One scene does directly address the mad evil licensed by Marxist-Leninism. Liuda’s father forces her to face up to what he witnessed 40 years before (in 1922 or 23) when a peasant from the Don region insulted a Commissar as a “barbaric person.” He remembers how that official cut the peasant’s tongue out, nailed it to the man’s chin and paraded him around various villages until the victim died. Bolshevism was barbarism is one takeaway from his story. Latter-day barbarians, though, are absent from Dear Comrades. Blowhards, hypocrites and dour suits make the cut, but there’s nobody like that Commissar from the Don or like Stalin who rolled “executions on his tongue like berries.”
To quote a line from Osip Mandelstam’s “Stalin Epigram”—the poem that doomed Mandelstam, though Stalin took his time, making the poet wait around to die. In her imperishable memoir of Russia’s Great Fear, Hope Against Hope, Mandelstam’s wife Nadezhda offered her own survey of behavior under the stamp of terror. She allowed that even her husband, whose goodness shines on, wasn’t a pure hero. (Near the end of his life he gave in and composed an ode to Stalin.) Hope Against Hope focused on varieties of victimhood, but Nadezhda Mandelstam didn’t neglect the killer elite: “For people of this extraordinary type, blood is like water and all individuals, except for the victorious ruler, are replaceable.” She recalled a “refined” example of this type—a culture cop named Elsberg who caught her attention when he published an article entitled “The Moral Experience of the Soviet Era.”
It appeared at a moment when there was a possibility of his being publicly exposed, and by writing an article under this title he was, as it were, suggesting to his readers that, as an authority on the moral standards of our age, he could scarcely be in any jeopardy. In fact, there were some revelations about him, but only some time later, and even so it proved impossible to apply such a mild sanction as expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers. He lost nothing at all…It was typical for Elsberg that, after getting his friend S. sent to a concentration camp, he continued to visit S.’s wife and gave her advice. She knew about his role, but was frightened of betraying her disgust: to expose informers was not done, and you paid a very high price for doing so. When S. returned after the Twentieth Congress, Elsberg met him with flowers, shaking his hand and congratulating him.
Mandelstam and her husband had to live “among people who vanished into exile, labor camps or the other world, and also among those who sent them there.” She pointed out post-Stalinist Russia couldn’t reckon with its past in part because so many Elsbergs were alive and well.
Konchalovsky knows the deal here, but his movie suggests irony rather than outrage is his default response to facts of collective guilt. Not that Dear Comrades is a palliative. No autocrat would feel entirely at ease with this film. It is, after all, an artful protest against authoritarianism, but is there anyone in it who could get under Putin’s skin? What’s certain is there’s no Elsbergian horror to remind Putin of all he shares with “people of this extraordinary type.”
There’s another reason why Putin might be able to brush off Dear Comrades. The Novocherkassk massacre is seen from above. Viewers are given no sense of how workers organized their strike or their protests. “The people” are depicted as masses–on the march, storming Party offices or running for their lives. Their initial self-organization remains a mystery. (Liuda’s daughter could’ve been a character who served as a vector of knowledge here but the comrades are, by definition, clueless.) Konchalovsky’s movie works as a drama, but his reconstruction of the past isn’t a model of history from below. Those in the struggle against Putin will have to look elsewhere for a usable past.
The movie’s distance from “the people” hints Konchalovsky may harbor a fear of chaos that Nadezhda Mandelstam once suggested was “the most permanent of…feelings” among the Russian intelligentsia:
There is not one of us…who does not believe that he would be the first victim if ever the mob got out of hand. “We should be the first to be hanged by the lamppost.”—whenever I hear this constantly repeated phrase, I remember Herzen’s words about the intelligentsia which so fears its own people that it prefers to go in chains itself, provided the people remain fettered.
What we wanted was for the course of history to be made smooth, all the ruts and potholes to be removed, so there should never again be any unforeseen events and everything should flow along evenly and according to plan. This longing prepared us, psychologically for the appearance of wise leaders who would tell us where we were going.
Mandelstam’s insight helps explain how a cool auteur like Konchalovsky—someone who clearly trusts himself—ended up reassuring RT’s election eve audience that Putin will “lead.”
In another interview a few years further back, Konchalovsky conceded Russia needed a public truth teller like the late Vaclav Havel, but then turned around to quash any hopes for the advent of an engaged humanist: “Russians aren’t Czechs.” His compatriots, in Konchalovsky’s view, are defined by their susceptibility to orthodoxy, their “medieval” mentality.” What did he see when he reviewed Russian history (going back to Peter the Great)? 350 years of would-be modernizers failing over and over to move Russia into the future. In his mind, Russia is “backward,” behind not only “the West” but China and India too. Konchalovsky doesn’t seem agitated by his country’s illiberalism. Instead of, say, giving Pussy Riot a pet, Konchalovsky attacks alien influences, noting the art of cinema has gone down the drain everywhere due to the West’s money-men and marketers. Who could argue with his diagnosis? Yet his discourse on the end of cinema may not be free of a subtle kind of what-aboutism.
His rap also seems less than disinterested given Dear Comrades’ opening credits, which nod to the “Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.” Please don’t understand me too quickly, as they say in Russian novels. I’m not proposing that credit is evidence of kompromat. OTOH, it could be a sign Konchalovsky’s film-making has been enabled by his instinct to stay above—or off to the side of—“chaos” in his homeland.
Notes
1 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dear-comrades-movie-review-2020
2 Her husband once tried to distinguish his own way of being from the bulk of his country’s intelligentsia. The poet traced his cultural lineage back to the raznochintsi—19th century Russian intellectuals who were “not of noble origin.” Despite his desire to de-link life of the mind from hierarchs, the Mandelstams were aware of the gulf between them and working class people. (“In Russia, everything always happens at the top. The people hold their peace only resisting in the meekest ways. They hate cruelty but do not believe in fighting it actively.”) Hope Against Hope’s final chapter offers a curious story about Mandelstam’s endgame that underscores his marginality. A witness who survived the Gulag reported to Nadia that he’d met her husband in a transit camp where the poet seems to have died in 1939. (No-one knows exactly how Mandelstam passed away.) The survivor ran into Mandelstam after becoming acquainted with a small group of common criminals who had secured a place to sleep indoors unlike the rest of the inmates in the transit camp who were freezing at night in tents. The criminals had agreed to let a dozen inmates into their sanctum but then the men in tents got scared at the prospect of sleeping next to robbers. The survivor, though, made friends with the robber-in-chief who invited him one day to come up to their loft and listen to some poetry…
The loft was lit by a candle. In the middle stood a barrel on which there was an open can of food and some white bread. For the starving camp this was an unheard-of luxury. People live don thin soup of which there was never enough—what they got for their morning meal would not have filled a glass….
Sitting with the criminals was a man with a gray stubble of a beard, wearing a yellow leather coat. He was reciting verse which L. recognized. It was Mandelstam. The criminals offered him bread and the canned stuff, and he calmly helped himself and ate. Evidently he was only afraid to eat food given him by his jailers. He was listened to in complete silence and sometimes asked to repeat a poem.