In 1962, Soviet government forces violently suppressed a strike against rising food prices in Novocherkassk, a city in the Don River region of southern Russia. It would be decades before the event received acknowledgment from official sources. A K.G.B. report, revealed after the fall of the Soviet Union, said that 20 bodies from the “liquidation” had been “buried in various places.” But for years, the slaughter was obscured from public view. Bodies? What bodies?

The Novocherkassk massacre, as it has become known, doesn’t occur until just before the halfway mark of “Dear Comrades!” Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, the film dramatizes these events primarily from the vantage point of Lyuda (Julia Vysotskaya), a city official at the local Communist Party headquarters. Viewed one way, almost everything shown before and after the violence constitutes the bleakest of bleak comedies, as bureaucrats try to square the emergence of a strike with the state’s narrative of socialist prosperity.

Lyuda, whose position affords her hypocritical access to choice goods, understands that her committee will take the blame. Clearly, the “clarification” process that she’s involved in — explaining why workers should accept increased food costs, even as their wages fall — “didn’t clarify far enough,” she says. She waxes nostalgic for the days of Stalin. Officially, nothing bad took place then either, although Khrushchev has just expelled Stalin’s body from Lenin’s tomb as part of a revisionist tack. “Why didn’t he say anything while Stalin was alive?” Lyuda asks, in a rueful recognition of past denial.

Such incongruities between words and circumstances might be comical if Konchalovsky didn’t so seamlessly infuse each scene with a tense, sickening feeling of inevitability; in a bracing way, it is tricky to pin down the tone of “Dear Comrades!” in any given moment. Rioters believe that Soviet soldiers won’t fire on them. High-ranking officials don’t see the point of an army without munitions.

Later, after the carnage — which Konchalovsky, perhaps best known in the United States for the taut action film “Runaway Train” (1985), renders in quick, brutal strokes — the goal becomes erasing it. Blood that the sun baked into the pavement can always be paved over. Lyuda, whose daughter (Yulia Burova) was embroiled in the protests and goes missing after they are over, might be able to save her — by writing a report calling for instigators to be shown no mercy. The K.G.B. issues nondisclosure agreements about the events. (What can’t be disclosed? Anything. What’s the penalty? As much as death.) In the most grimly absurd scene, Viktor (Andrei Gusev), a K.G.B. agent who eventually becomes Lyuda’s confidant, tries to explain the preposterous scope of the pledge to a nurse — then, upon learning she was in the crowd, has her arrested on the spot.

Konchalovsky complements the screw-tightening atmosphere with a claustrophobic visual style. “Dear Comrades!” is shot in black-and-white and in near-square image dimensions instead of wide-screen. Even the choice of angles, with an emphasis on doorways and private spaces, contributes to the sense of lives lived furtively.

Dear Comrades!
Not rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.