The Soviet Holiday Classic Even Kremlin Skeptics Can’t Stop Watching

When the film “The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!” premiered on millions of television sets in the Soviet Union on Jan. 1, 1976, Igor Rogovyi was 9 and living in Odesa, Ukraine.

“This movie is from the depths of my childhood,” Rogovyi said. “I have very good memories of it.”

On Tuesday, as Russian speakers around the world prepare elaborate New Year’s Eve dinners, “The Irony of Fate” will be playing in the background in many homes: on TV in some countries, or via streaming services like YouTube or Smotrim, a Russian state television website.

The Russian-language movie blends romantic comedy with a subversive commentary on the state-enforced sameness of Soviet life, which gave it an edgy appeal. Despite its veiled criticism, “The Irony of Fate” was broadcast during every new year holiday, and the tradition of watching it continues today in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, like Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia.

For many people who grew up in the Soviet Union or in the aftermath of its breakup, “The Irony of Fate” is to the new year holidays what “The Grinch” or “Home Alone” is to an American Christmas. But unlike those more innocent equivalents, “The Irony of Fate” has faced controversy and rejection since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in 2014, bringing a wave of wariness toward Russian cultural hallmarks — not least in Ukraine itself.

The film opens with a short, satirical cartoon about Soviet bureaucrats forcefully replacing idiosyncratic historic buildings with nearly identical, unadorned apartment blocks. Sameness, a major feature of Soviet urban design, is an important theme in the movie and a key factor in making its improbable plot work.

After a very intoxicated Zhenya, a middle-aged man who lives in Moscow, accidentally flies to what is now St. Petersburg, he orders a taxi and ends up in an apartment nearly indistinguishable from his own. He’s too drunk to understand that he’s not in Moscow, but 400 miles away.

When the apartment’s true occupant, Nadya, gets home, she finds a stranger with no pants on asleep in her bed. High jinks ensue. One of the most beloved aspects of the film is the music: Characters periodically pull out guitars and sing folk songs with lyrics by renowned Soviet writers like Bella Akhmadulina, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva.

Balzhan Bekenova, who grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan, said that the movie “was always running on television on every channel” in the 1990s during the new year holidays. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan have remained in Russia’s sphere of influence.

Over time, Bekenova developed a deep affection for “The Irony of Fate,” though today she said she felt some wariness about how Moscow had shaped her cultural worldview, including via popular Russian-language films.

Still, since moving to Europe in 2017 — first to Prague, then to Berlin — Bekenova said she has needed to watch “The Irony of Fate” around the new year holidays to have “a festive feeling.”

“The film has this strong connection with home for me,” Bekenova said. “I even showed it to my German husband on New Year’s, so he could also understand this part of my identity.”

Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, “The Irony of Fate,” which used to regularly appear on TV in Ukraine, has been rejected by many Ukrainians as a relic of Russia’s imperialist past. Russian is still widely spoken in Ukraine, alongside Ukrainian, but Russian movies and TV shows quickly vanished from most Ukraine’s public channels and theaters after the 2014 invasion.

In 2015, the Ukrainian culture ministry released a blacklist of figures who it said posed a threat to national security: One of them was an actress, Valentina Talyzina, who played a minor role in “The Irony of Fate.” (The ministry didn’t give a reason for her inclusion, but in 2014, she signed a public letter supporting the invasion of Crimea.) According to Ukraine’s broadcasting laws, Talyzina’s inclusion in the film means that any Ukrainian television channel that screens it faces a fine.

Olha Bregman, the chairwoman of the Ukrainian Film Academy, said that Russia promoted Soviet pop-culture artifacts to inspire nostalgia for a time when the country was a powerful empire with control over Ukraine. That also happens to be the time when people now in retirement age were in their formative years. “Russia uses all these Soviet classic films as heritage, and a way to control and influence this older generation of people,” Bregman said.

Still, for some, “The Irony of Fate” remains part of the canon.

“There are about 10 to 15 Soviet films that I can rewatch even now,” said Dimitri Kanevski, 50, who grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine, but has lived in the United States since the 1990s. During the holidays, he said, “We would go skiing, play hockey across the street, come home, turn on the TV, and they’re playing ‘The Irony of Fate.’ Movies like these don’t get boring.”

Alla Malani, 55, who grew up in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, and also lives in the United States now, estimates that she has seen “The Irony of Fate” about 25 times. “On New Year’s, in our gifts, we had a mandarin and a few pieces of chocolate, and ‘The Irony of Fate’ always on in the background,” she said. (The Soviet Union had a scarcity of citrus fruits, so mandarin oranges were a prized holiday treat.)

Rogovyi and his wife, Svetlana Bulashevska, who emigrated from Odesa to Germany in the 1990s, said they would most likely be watching the film again on Tuesday. For years, they caught it on Russian TV channels broadcast in Germany, but more recently, frustrated by the pro-Kremlin bent of the shows they found there, they’ve switched to YouTube.

Bulashevska said that she and her husband had stopped watching Russian television, read only protest literature in Russian, and listen to Russian musicians only if they have taken a clear stance against the war in Ukraine.

But “The Irony of Fate” remains on their holiday roster — for several reasons.

A supporting actress in the film, Liya Akhedzhakova, has been a vocal critic of the Kremlin and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Last year, she resigned from the theater where she worked amid pressure from pro-government sources. Barbara Brylska, one of the film’s leads, supported Akhedzhakova’s decision and encouraged her to flee Russia, which, she said, “is not worthy of her.”

Kremlin supporters responded by calling for Brylska and Akhedzhakova to be replaced in the movie by deepfakes, an idea that the head of Mosfilm, the studio that produced “Irony of Fate,” called “foolishness.”

Beyond the politics, Bulashevska and Rogovyi see the film as a cherished piece of their childhoods.

“The extent of our hatred toward the Russian government is impossible to express, but this film is part of a specific ritual — and destroying it would be equivalent to destroying New Year’s Eve,” Rogovyi said. “We don’t want to reject one of the last things that connects us to our youth.”