Soviet Strike Film

 “Dear Comrades”directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, 2020

This is a fictional, black and white account of the massacre of dozens of workers in the Soviet city of Novocherkassk in 1962 after a rate cut at the local factory and a nationwide hike in food prices.  Novocherkassk is just northwest of Rostov near the Don River.  The town was already struggling with food shortages.  It produces a strike of thousands at the massive Budyonny electric locomotive plant in the city, which spread to other factories.  In response the film pictures an almost comical mix of inept local bureaucrats and Moscow heavies who, in spite of some resistance, eventually do the wrong thing.

Dorogiye tovarishchi

One of the local Party leaders had cut piece-work wages at the same time as food prices were raised.  The stern regional Don Party leader is irritated by this, especially after he hears that many of the workers are supposedly former criminals - although there is no evidence of this in reality.  After strikes, the occupation of the factory by the workers, some rioting in the city and the escape of the local Party committee to avoid talking to the workers, the city is sealed off by the military and the KGB.

LYUDMILA

The key character is a local Party functionary, Lyudmila, whose young daughter Tamarka is among the strikers.  At the key meeting of the Moscow leadership’s Government Commission and the local Party to discuss the situation, Lyudmila blurts out that all the ‘hooligans’ should be arrested and dealt with severely. She is asked to write up her recommendation, which is where the title of the film comes from, as her recommendation begins “Dear Comrades.”  No one suggests reversing the rate cut or restoring old food prices, or any other amelioration.

 The local Army commander refuses to issue ammunition to his soldiers because the Army is for defense only and not allowed to fire on Soviet citizens.  He is chastised by the Moscow delegation, being ordered to do so. (He was punished for this later, but not shown in the film.)  Central Committee member Mikoyan attempts to get them to let things simmer down, then talk to the workers.  He is contradicted by Central Committee member Kozlov and goes along with the subsequent approach.  The approach was also approved by Khrushchev, though this is not shown in the film.

Lyudmila’s apartment is filled with several pictures of Stalin, while her aging father, who is living with them, is a former White Cossack.  Lyudmila says that price rises didn’t happen under Stalin.  Tamarka says they have the right under the Soviet Constitution to protest and speak, and that Stalin was a criminal, as shown by the 20^th Congress.  Lyudmila screams at her and the daughter storms out of the apartment. 

Thousands of workers march to the central Party headquarters in the central city, walking around and over tanks, sometimes helped by the soldiers.  They arrive and the military forms a line in front of the building, arresting some who get inside.  The KGB is in the crowd in civilian clothes, taking pictures of ‘instigators.’  Lyudmila notices a KGB sniper going up on the roof of the building.  The massive crowd is angry that no one has come to negotiate with them.  The military shoots over their heads as the crowd gets angry and then shots start hitting the workers.  According to later statistics, at least 26 workers were killed and 87 injured, although Solzhenitsyn’s figures from witnesses are higher, closer to a 100 dead. In the film we find out that KGB snipers in internal security did the killings, as the shots were well-directed.

The crowd stampedes, including Lyudmila who is looking for her daughter, and many are killed.  The bodies are thrown into the back of trucks and only a few are sent to the local morgue, while others are taken out of town and secretly buried in unmarked graves.  The square is repaved as the blood will not wash out.

The KGB gets everyone in the hospital and city to sign documents that they will never mention the ‘incident’ to anyone, on pain of prison or execution.  Only in 1992 was information about the shootings publicly released in Russia.

Lyudmila is distressed and eventually talks to a ‘friendly’ KGB agent, who had come to her apartment checking on her daughter, into finding her daughter’s body.  It was not in the hospital or local morgue and she seemingly discounts the idea that her daughter is hiding with a friend. At a local village cemetery she ‘thinks’ she has found the body, becomes distraught and drunk.  Later her daughter Tamarka appears on the roof of the apartment building, and they are reunited. Lyudmila pledges to ‘do better’ in the future, probably chastened about her idiotic and cruel comment at the meeting. 

Kazakh Oil Workers Strike

STRIKES and REPRESSION

This film is made in Putin time, still a period of nostalgia for the Czar, Kerensky or Stalin.  The most right-wing sequence is the grandfather reading a letter of how the Reds murdered White Cossack civilians in 1923 during the Civil War.  As is well known, the Czarist Whites were accomplished murderers themselves, but Lyudmila has an incomplete response to her father.  The military general admits, after a gruesome depiction of how to tie up a victim for execution, that if he was a worker, he’d have been in the crowd too.   Strikes were illegal in the bureaucratic workers state that was the USSR, but technically you could ‘have your say.’

While not in the film, over 200 were arrested, some sentenced to 15 years, while 7 more were executed.  On the internet, there is a picture of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin laying a wreath at a Novocherkassk memorial to victims of the massacre in 2008.  Irony!

Killing demonstrators in many capitalist countries is routine and has happened in the U.S. too, along with ‘pogroms’ against African-Americans and Chicanos.  Just this week the corrupt capitalist rulers of Kazakhstan killed and wounded around 200, imprisoning thousands in a strike wave led by oil workers, many of whom work for U.S. oil firms.  ‘Ironically,’ Putin is sending in troops to put down the Kazakh workers’ rebellion.  The military government of Sudan is shooting demonstrators week after week as it clings to power.  Israeli soldiers take out a Palestinian teenager every day it seems, when they aren’t bombing Gaza or Syria.  It’s all business as usual on the ‘fringes’ of the world imperialist economic core.

In the Novocherkassk case, the leaders of a ‘socialist’ workers society killed proletarians who carried banners of Lenin and the red hammer and sickle flag.  It is notable that in this time period massacres like this were a rare occurrence.  Shooting workers has also occasionally happened in other so-called ‘socialist’ societies as we know, with dire consequences.

(Note: The lead actress, Yuliya Vysotskaya, is originally from Novocherkassk and married to the director.)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” and “War With Russia,” (both by Cohen); “Enemy at the Gates,” “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” “Democracy, Planning, Big Data,” “The Ghost of Stalin” (Sartre); “Ivan’s Childhood,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Women in Soviet Art,” “Life and Fate” (Grossman); “Soviet Women,” “The Unwomanly Face of War” (Alexievich); “Reinventing Collapse” (Orlov); “Slavs and Tatars,” “Polar Star,” “The Red Atlantis,” “Lenin’s Last Struggle” (Lewin); “Fear” (Rybakov); “The Struggle for Power.”

The Kultur Kommissar / January 11, 2022