ABSTRACT
There is a film made in the 1970s and shown every New Year’s Eve on television in the former Soviet Union in which a young doctor gets drunk at a party and ends up on a flight home – he is heading to Moscow. When he lands and leaves the airport, still drunk, he gets into a taxi, gives the driver his home address and when he arrives at a block of flats he takes the lift up and uses his key to enter a flat, whereupon he falls asleep in the bed. A short time later a young woman enters the flat and screams in fright. The doctor wakes up and demands to know who she is and what she is doing in his flat. She tells him that no, this is her flat. After some incoherent argument it transpires that it is indeed her flat – in Leningrad, not Moscow. The doctor’s own girlfriend is waiting for him in Moscow ready to celebrate the new year while the boyfriend of the girl in Leningrad arrives home for their own party, only to find another man there. What has happened is that in both Moscow and in Leningrad – and indeed in many other cities across the then Soviet Union – residential landscapes had become practically interchangeable and someone could find themselves in an almost identical place, where even their front door key would fit. Such was the standardisation of blocks of flats organised into massive housing areas, divided hierarchically into Mikrorayon, Dom, Korpus and Kvartirye, that there was no sense of local identity. The doctor had got on the wrong flight and just went to what seemed like the area where he lived, but was actually the sector of a different city. The irony of fate of the title (Ironya Sudby) is that the doctor and the young woman meet in these circumstances and fall for each other.
