Dear Comrades!

 Dear Comrades!, a 2020 film by Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky, is about the events of early June 1962 in the Soviet city of Novocherkassk.  A Moscow directive raising the price of meat and milk, combined with a reduction of pay in a city factory, led to worker protests, which were suppressed when KGB snipers fired on unarmed demonstrators in a city square.  Accurate information on the events was also suppressed until the last years of the Soviet Union.  The bodies of those killed were buried secretly in unmarked graves at undisclosed locations.  It was only in 1994 that relatives were notified of the location of the burials.

The Novocherkassk massacre also serves as the climax of one of the finest books I've read, and written about twice - Red Plenty and Khrushchev Reflects - a book which should be required reading in college.

The movie is focused on Lyudmila (Julia Vysotskaya, Konchalovsky's wife), a member of the Communist Party City Committee, an absolute believer in the Party who stridently expresses her views and support of the party line. When her daughter becomes a participant in the protests and then can't be found in the aftermath of the shootings in the city square, Lyudmila begins a frantic search to find if she is dead or alive, during which she learns how the Party is literally covering up the extent of the carnage.

Filmed in striking black and white, Dear Comrades! is a movie made in outrage and anger, but it also shows the psychological confusion induced in Soviet citizens, and particularly among Party members when, after a lifetime of immersion in Communist education and sloganeering, they are faced with its brutal reality.  If all their beliefs and sacrifices meant nothing in the end, what is left?  They had no other context, no other reference points, having been so isolated from the rest of the world, and any counter viewpoints within their country silenced - for Lyudmila it is either Stalin or Khrushchev; the striking workers carry posters portraying Lenin.  At one point, Lyudmila, thinking her daughter is dead, laments that if only Stalin were still alive this would not be happening, an echo of those who, in the midst of the Great Terror in the 1930s would say, "if only Stalin knew!" when hearing of yet another random arrest and somehow disassociating the Great Leader from the act, believing he would intervene to stop it, though the truth was Stalin knew very well and, indeed, was its director.

Recommended.