Two Russian Families and a Century of Terror

Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Dear Comrades!,” Russia’s entry this year for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (streaming on Hulu), opens with the chords of the Russian national anthem. The director was five or six years old when his father, Sergei Mikhalkov, first co-wrote the lyrics for the anthem, which included praise for Lenin and Stalin. Decades later, Mikhalkov rewrote the lyrics to remove Stalin, and, in 2000, immediately after Vladimir Putin became President, Mikhalkov, then in his eighties, rewrote the lyrics yet again, omitting Lenin and, for the first time, invoking a supreme deity rather than a cult of personality: “From the southern seas to the polar edge / Our forests and fields have stretched. / You are the only one in the world! The only one like this / Our native land, protected by God.”