In the days of auld lang syne…
The past few days have witnessed tit for tat missile strikes between the Russians and the Ukrainians that brought their war back to the front pages of mainstream Western newspapers and to the hourly news broadcasts of major international broadcasters, competing for attention with the vicious, genocidal assaults of the Israeli Defense Force on Gaza Palestinians, where the level of destruction of civilian infrastructure and murder of civilians is incomparably greater than what is going on in Ukraine and across the border in Russia today.
I will come back to the underlying issues of these exchanges of missile strikes tomorrow. The calendar, at 31st December, calls for a time out in big picture analysis and redirection of attention to the more comforting subject of seasonal celebrations and the distractions of old films available on the internet that so many of us are now watching in the free time of these holidays.
Several years ago, a high school girlfriend of German parentage brought to my attention a short film made in Germany, where it enjoyed extraordinary success and is linked to the New Year’s time there as closely as A Christmas Carol, in its many film iterations, is to Anglo-American Christmas. This film was long ago translated into English as Dinner for One. To my understanding this bitter sweet comedy has become a seasonal hit in the United States and the wider world. Here is one of many links to this film for those among you who have not yet discovered it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n7VI0rC8ZA&t=52s
And now allow me to bring to your attention a parallel tradition of the seasonal hit from Mother Russia. Only this bitter sweet comedy from Mosfilm dated 1975 is a two part ‘serial’ that runs three hours. Regrettably, The Irony of Fate, is available only in Russian. See
https://dzen.ru/video/watch/6422a1d421067969f34c3bf5?sid=950108929118490369
In what follows, I will give you an overview which provides an insight into why this film has become an obligatory item on Russian state television at New Year’s time and why it is very popular among the generations of Russians who lived part of their lives in the USSR.
The Irony of Fate is considered a comedy, but the striking feature of the film is the presentation of Soviet reality in the mid-1970s, during the Brezhnev era of détente with the West. French perfume was still available for purchase in GUM and other shops to present as a New Year’s present to one’s beloved. But the only champagne on offer was Soviet shampanskoye, since import of consumer goods was spotty and very limited. This was later identified as a period of ‘stagnation,’ but it was stagnation at a fairly high level compared to the long slide towards economic chaos that began a decade later, under Gorbachev.
In case the buildings and apartments shown in the film seem to make a good case for Soviet Communism to some of you, I point out that the hero of the film, a doctor practicing in a city clinic, would have been among the lowest paid urban citizens of the time. That follows from the fact that medicine was then a women’s profession except for the well paid specialties of gynecology and dentistry. And the social leveling described in the film pertained to the urban population. Soviet farmers and others living on the land were dirt poor.
The reality presented in this film is regarded with nostalgia today by many of those who were alive during the days of the Soviet Union. To our eyes, in the West, it was a sad reality distinguished by social leveling and few rewards for initiative and achievement. In our culture, this means hopelessness. It is this very leveling that the script writers used to create their theater of the absurd.
In the 1970s, the Soviets undertook massive construction of new residential districts in cities across the country using identical architectural plans for 8-story apartment houses. As we are told in the introductory segment to the film, the same street names were assigned in each city. The same building numbers and apartment numbers were assigned, This meant that you could land in almost any city which you had never seen before and instantly feel ‘at home.’ In each building the floor layouts were the same. In each apartment there were the same interior furnishings, and, as it turns out, identical locks in the doors of apartments with the same number to be opened by identical keys. Exaggerated as this sounds, it is not far from the historical truth.
That is half the social reality which supports the outlandish narrative of the film. The other half is sadder still, namely the widely accepted drunkenness among the male population of all classes and professions. Because the ‘irony of fate’ in this case is how the hero, a single medical doctor in his mid 30s, a mother’s boy who is about to finally ‘pop the question’ and propose marriage to his girlfriend of the past two years on New Year's eve is instead made hopelessly drunk by his friends in their traditional 31st December reunion in a local banya (communal bathhouse) as they all prepare for the magic evening. In his unconscious state, they take him with them by plane to Leningrad. Upon arrival there, unaware of where he is, he takes a taxi to ‘his’ street, gets out at ‘his’ building and opens the door to ‘his’ apartment. There he is found dead asleep by the school teacher owner, an attractive single woman and in her mid-30s, who has prepared for the visit of her long time suitor. He has come to ‘pop the question’ to her during their New Year’s eve tryst until he discovers this drunken stranger in her bed and everything goes awry.
You get the idea.
I will not comment further on the standardized living conditions that some Russian viewers today obviously find so attractive. But I will comment on the rampant alcoholism that is the second causal factor in this theater of the absurd.
Nineteen seventy-five was the first of five years that I spent traveling to the Soviet Union from New York almost monthly, serving as a consultant to major U.S. industrial companies that sought to establish agreements on Scientific and Technical Cooperation with Soviet ministries and manufacturing or agricultural combines for the sake of multi-billion dollar sales contracts. At the high level meetings with factory directors and ministers, I usually acted as the interpreter, seated between the principal negotiators for the two sides at banquets. And there always were banquets!
No such event was complete until our host was pouring vodka down my sleeve. I recall in particular one festive lunch at a meat processing plant in a room just adjacent to the kill floor. We had just left behind a blind drunk work crew. This was understandable given the awful nature of their job. But here as we sat down to an elegant lunch, our host warned us that we might be seeing the ballet performance at the Bolshoy which was scheduled for us after this factory visit ‘in rainbow colors.’ Sadly, he was very correct, and several in our team were just laid out on their beds to sleep it off when we were hauled over to our hotel.
Those were the days! Happily this kind of obnoxious drinking in the high as well as low spheres of Russian society is long gone. Russia has sobered up over the past two decades, and I personally, see no reason to regret the passing of 1970s Soviet reality, however nicely it was dressed up by clever film directors and script writers.
*****
I close this essay with a brief remark on the pre-New Year’s eve performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute that I attended yesterday at the Royal Opera of Wallonie in Liège, located about 110 km south of Brussels.
Liège is a city that is probably best known outside Belgium for its endemic corruption, a situation which is perpetuated by the near monopoly of political power by the Socialist party over many decades. But it is also a culturally conservative city. The opera house has been run by a succession of musical directors and Intendants who offer traditional interpretations of well loved classical operas, rather than the trendy and often trashy productions that the management of the Monnaie opera house in Brussels offers to the international sophisticates from the diplomatic and European Community contingents in their audience.
Yesterday’s production of The Magic Flute was true to form. The printed program pointed out the philosophical tilt of the opera towards Free Masonry. But what was on stage was the full power of Mozart’s virile personality, even in 1791, when the composer was already seriously ill with the ailment that brought about his death several months after completing the opera.
This opera celebrates heterosexual love and procreation as the driving forces of humanity. Shall we be indulgent and call this ‘family values’? The audience of 1500 was warmly sympathetic to the message. They also had a good laugh at the remarks in song that ‘women must follow the guidance of men.’
I mention this as a response and a rebuke to the line repeated daily on Russian state television that Western civilization is rotting from within, that LGBTQ+ is the vanguard of Europe’s denial of traditional values and is perverting all public entertainment.
The death of Western civilization is grossly exaggerated.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023