Stay updated with breaking news from Yuliya burova. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Dear Comrades! Photo: Courtesy Roxie Theater Retirement isn’t for everyone least of all, it seems, for film directors. Roman Polanski wrapped 2019’s J’Accuse when he was 86 (whether, as suggested, it’s his last feature remains to be seen); Jean-Luc Godard directed his most recent film at 88, and Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira put them both to shame by working into his 104th year. In comparison, Andrei Konchalovsky is a sprightly youngster. His brief and only marginally successful Hollywood career now well in the rear-view mirror (remember Tango & Cash and Dorogie tovarishchi ( Shot in academy ratio and in black and white, ....
Konchalovsky; written by Konchalovsky and Elena Kiseleva Dear Comrades, the Russian entry for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards, addresses one of the most significant and least understood episodes in the history of the Soviet Union: the massacre of dozens of workers in Novocherkassk on June 2, 1962, on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Twenty-six people are believed to have been killed in the incident (other estimates go far higher), but the real number was never established and perhaps never will be. Seven young workers were accused of “banditry” and executed, while dozens more were sent to labor camps for many years. Most were not rehabilitated until the dissolution of the USSR. ....
The trauma undergone by the Russian people over the past 150 years or more is impossible to humanly comprehend. It’s like a black hole of suffering and dysfunction. Hell, just by saying 150 years I could be lowballing things. The Russian situation is so sufficiently monumental that if you ever think you’ve got a handle on it, you will be proven wrong in short order. For instance: the 1962 massacre in Novocherkassk, in the southeastern corner of Russia, at which between 26 and 80 persons were killed for peacefully protesting hikes in food costs with no concurrent raises in wages. This atrocity occurred in what was supposed to be a “thaw” in the Soviet Union, with Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev letting up a little on the repression. And yet. ....