Dear Comrades, Or Communist Ideology Leading To Unmarked Graves
Art & Totalitarianism Studies 2
So I have a new podcast with Flagg Taylor in our ACF Europe Series, which gathers in one archive our recurring theme over the last several years—Art & Tyranny. Primarily, we discuss the most striking 21st c. development in cinema: Movies about Communism in Europe: In Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine, & today we introduce our first Russian story, & first Russian director, the veteran Andrey Konchalovsky, who started his career as a protégé of Tarkovsky. Konchalovsky’s 2020 movie Dear Comrades was the best thing in cinema that year, a true story about the Novocherkassk Massacre of 1962.
Stalin died in 1953—Khrushchev succeeded him & promised some kind of de-Stalinization, an end to what he called the “excesses” of Stalinism, from the cult of personality to the purges & show trials—& by 1962, a new generation, the children of the war years, let’s say, came of age. Now, the promise of socialism must either be finally fulfilled or ultimately denied. The invading Nazi enemy was destroyed; the Soviet power was paramount in a large part of the world, not just in Russia; & yet in the small Ukrainian industrial city of Novocherkassk unrest starts when the Communist Party announces wage cuts & price increases. A great empire & a great misery cannot go together! A worker revolt ensues, testing the regime—will Communism be on the side of the proletariat? Of course, Communism turns out instead to be the most horrifying tyranny, not only committing massacres, but annihilating their memory after it annihilates the human beings themselves.
Konchalovsky pits against this conquering evil our frail, but remarkably enduring biology—this is a story about a Communist party official mother searching for her young student-worker daughter out protesting. Family v. ideology—but also faith, history, & memory v. The Great Lie that was Communism. This seems strange, the apolitical fighting the political, but after all Russia is still there, whereas Soviet Communism is over! Konchalovsky was born in 1943—he himself came of age around the time of the Novocherkassk Massacre & he survived Communism while gaining the artistic freedom, alongside other freedoms, required to tell the truth about the past. He is living proof that the truth will out, which is also the theme of Dear Comrades.
A fictional account of a true event, or a poetic rendering of history—this is the theme of our Art & Totalitarianism series within our Europe Series—what do we learn about human nature from these wonderful artists? What do we learn about the conflict between political utopianism & our souls? In this conversation, I went out of my way to compare the strong independent woman at the core of Konchalovsky’s story to feminism & her Stalinist ideology to the woke madness of our own times—we are still stuck with the problem of ideology, even though Communism is over, we are still stuck with the problem of politicizing human nature in evil ways.
Konchalovsky is not only offering an education to Russians about their history—how they might understand their past, the horrors inflicted & incurred, the inexpungible evils of tyranny & the natural power of human nature to return—he is also offering us an education, we citizens of the democracies. Perhaps, this is an education above all for Americans, who escaped the terrible civilization-ending strife of the World Wars, which put an end to European power. One aspect of this necessary education is about political strife—Americans simply have no memory of the Civil War & therefore no understanding of the dangers facing law & democracy. But another aspect of the education is moral & psychological—the characters in Konchalovsky’s movie, as well as in the other stories we discuss, are very familiar to us, however strange the tyranny they suffer under… That paradox—unrecognizable politics, intimately familiar protagonists—is what we need to learn about if we are to learn why the American Cold War victory has led to madness in America rather than peace.
Enjoy our Konchalovsky podcast & indeed our entire series, on which more later—also, you can stream these movies online nowadays. Digital technology to help us grasp our humanity—that’s the ACF motto, & a proud PoMoCon principle! Here, too, is a trailer:
Dear Flagg and Titus: c/c what Flagg says here at 2:30, and "endnote 13" in the introduction to Totalitarianism on Screen, which features my effort from a decade ago to list the most prominent films dealing with communism. A full list which justified all choices would have to be a scholarly article, but I would strongly invite you two to compile an updated list for PostModernConservative, building upon my endnote and what you two have learned since then.
Very good idea!