Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dear Comrades!’ on Hulu, an Extraordinary Russian Drama About a Woman at Terrible Odds With Her Ideology

Now on Hulu, Dear Comrades! is Russia’s official International Oscar entry and, review spoiler alert, it surely deserves to be among the five final contenders. Directed by Andrey Konchalovskiy (whose credits include Runaway Train (!) and Tango and Cash (!!)), the film is a grim, grimly ironic, grimly ironically humorous dramatization of the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre, told from the POV of a Communist Party bureaucrat who finds her loyalties stretched to their breaking point. She’s played by Yulia Vysotskaya, who’s a revelation. You’ve gotta see it.

DEAR COMRADES!: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Lyuda (Vysotskaya) has an important-sounding title in her job as a person who sits in boardrooms for the Communist Party in Novocherkassk, U.S.S.R. Everyone has three or four words in their job title — all the better to bury critics in obfuscatory confusionalism. Hers carries enough sway to cut the line at the deli, where the proletariats gather in teeming, vociferous throngs to get food, which is in increasingly short supply. She gets salami, cigarettes for her ancient father, matches, some pantry staples and, oh, by the way, how about this Hungarian liquor? Sure! Food is more expensive than it used to be, too. Oh, and the government-run Electric Locomotive Plant just cut wages by a third, so have fun feeding yourselves and your families, proles!

It’s the morning of June 1, 1962. Lyuda rushes from the bed of a man married to someone else to the deli to her apartment. She argues with her 18-year-old daughter Svetka (Yuliya Burova), a progressive who works in the factory, and you’d swear it was the back-and-forth you’d hear between a young American and their Trump-supporting parent. Lyuda goes to work, where she’s passionately involved with “sensitization activities,” and if we saw her doing them, we might know what the eff they are. Note: We will never know, and that sure seems intentional. She and her co-workers are in the midst of creating and/or navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth — hard to tell which — when they hear a siren from outside. The phone rings. The factory workers are revolting, and not just in the sense that Lyuda and her associates are disgusted by these people. I mean, they’ve formed an angry mob and have taken over the facility. Morons and hooligans they are, the Communists in their suits insist.

Lyuda goes home and is disgusted to learn that Svetka believes in this revolution. It’s just a temporary hardship, Lyuda asserts like a red robot programmed to spout red slogans in a bitter and dismissive tone cultivated by years of simmering anger. Lyuda commiserates with her father (Sergei Erlish) about how they fought for Stalin and boy, those were the good old days. Simpler times. The old man says he’s glad he’ll die soon so he won’t have to deal with it, and Kennedy should just bomb ’em so they can start over, and then digs up his old fascist-military uniform and puts it on for gits and shiggles.

The next day, the mob gathers. Lyuda tells her superiors that these peaceful protesters — er, I mean, deranged hooligans should be summarily and harshly punished. The Army is here, the KGB is here, the local Communist Party even has Krushchev putting his finger in their shit pie. As the workers storm the government building, forcing the desk-sitter-atters to evacuate, Lyuda spots a man with a sniper rifle in his perch. She avoids the men overturning desks and heads to the chaotic streets, when suddenly, shots ring out. From where? More shots. Protesters are going down. Innocent passersby are going down. Lyuda helps a woman with a bloody leg into a hair salon and props her up and a bullet goes through the window and kills her anyway. Do we see Svetka through that very same glass? Maybe. But Lyuda doesn’t. And in the aftermath, she’s worried sick about her daughter as authorities hunt down anyone involved in the protest. Because Svetka hasn’t turned up. And the position Lyuda finds herself in, strung between the well-being of her offspring and her obedient political faith, is a big ol’ pickle.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Dear Comrades! is somewhere between the eviscerating satire of The Death of Stalin and something Michael Haneke might make (think The White Ribbon) if he was less of a f—ing lunatic.

Performance Worth Watching: Vysotskaya is magnetic whether reflexively, angrily and blindly goose-stepping to the beat of her ideology or dwelling in the dread anxiety of the thought of her daughter’s potential death.

Memorable Dialogue: “If Stalin were alive, we’d be living under communism already!” — Lyuda

Sex and Skin: Some casual female nudity.

Our Take: Konchalovskiy strikes a distinctive tone that bridges the gap between insidious satire and heavyweight historical drama. There’s nothing funny about what happened in Novocherkassk that day, when dozens were killed, bodies were shuttled away and buried in unmarked graves and the entire town was forced to sign threatening NDAs in order to keep the tragedy under wraps for as long as possible. But the depiction of the USSR’s governmental ineptitude is subtly hysterical — nobody wants to address whether they’re operating under the tenets of Communism or socialism or fascism or whatever amoral bullshit the KGB propagates.

Lyuda’s situation is riveting, summed up by a shot in which she sweats out the night Svetka doesn’t come home by watching state-run hooray-for-Communism propagandist television. She used to lean on it for comfort, and now the sloganeering and singing, marching children maybe don’t seem so comforting anymore. Earlier that day, she watched soldiers crassly pile bodies in the back of a truck and try to hose the blood off the square which ended up needing a fresh layer of asphalt because it wouldn’t wash away. You know how some people struggle to empathize with the plights of other people until they find themselves thrust into plights of their own? That’s Lyuda.

The film’s tight, black-and-white 4:3 cinematography feels alien and foreign, but once the subtext begins to sizzle, the film starts hitting home. It was obviously made well before seditionists attempted an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, as well as Vladimir Putin’s more recent crackdown on protesters in the wake of the Alexei Navalny poisoning, but Dear Comrades! lands heavier and mightier blows in the wake of those events. It would’ve been potent anyway, horrific and gripping and funny and making us feel uncomfortable in all the ways provocative films should.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Dear Comrades! is essential.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Dear Comrades! on Hulu