The Irony of Fate

It’s New Year’s Eve and we’re about to enter 2022. I have no Idea what the future has in store for any of us… and neither does anyone else. So instead of guessing about what’s to come I’d like to look back at the past through a peculiar lens. As a young American with very little money in the late 1980s I packed a duffel bag and headed to Leningrad and Moscow by way of Helsinki just after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. I had a spirt of adventure, a desire to see history unfold, a keen eye toward a favorable currency exchange, and a yearning for uncharted territory. What I found was a fabulously dysfunctional political and economic system full of wonderful people, great food, opportunities for romance, and a rich culture that went back at least 800 years.

For you, dear reader, I present a tiny taste of Soviet life at its most airbrushed and state sanitized with a teeny hint of good humored rebellion. “The Irony of Fate” was a film produced in 1976 that’s the rough equivalent of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Russian speakers continue to watch and enjoy this film each New Year with nostalgia.

The plot is simple and plays on the fact that communist central planning churned out millions of identical apartment buildings filled with identical furniture, identical pots and pans, identical clothes, and so on through uniformed mass production. The opening credits are a mini film unto itself with cartoon animation showing Soviet town planning in action.

When the film begins in earnest a man celebrates with his buddies at the banya and drunkenly gets on a flight from Moscow to Leningrad by mistake. He stumbles to what he thinks is his own apartment, opens the door with a key that happens to fit, and falls asleep in someone else’s bed. The legitimate occupant of the apartment, played by a beautiful Polish actress, comes home to find this strange man in her bed. A comedy of errors ensues with a romantic ending. The complete film is available for free on YouTube.