Spotlight
SOVIET DREAMS Words Jānis Bērziņš
Imagine this situation: you and your friends get together on New Year’s Eve in Moscow. You get drunk, really drunk, and eventually pass out. Two of your friends are still awake and remember that one of you must go to Leningrad (nowadays Saint-Petersburg) and needs to catch a plane, but they don’t remember who. So they decide to put you on the plane.
Eventually you wake up, and you’re still drunk. You step out of the plane, staggering and holding to other people, and after a while realise that you’re in an airport. You think that, obviously, you’re in Moscow and probably just said goodbye to the friend who had to go to Leningrad. So you call a cab, say your address and let the car movement guide you in a peaceful sleep. You arrive at your building, go to the elevator and then to your apartment door, open it with your key, enter the apartment and take off your clothes. You go to the bedroom and fall asleep, until… Until the real owner of the apartment comes home and wakes you up, because you’re an intruder in her home. However, you still believe that you are in your apartment in Moscow and that she has intruded your apartment! Sounds funny and impossible, doesn’t it? This story is familiar to millions of people from post-soviet countries because it is the plot of a TV Mini-series called The Irony of Fate (Ирония судьбы, или С лёгким паром) by director Eldar Ryazanov, first aired on January 1, 1976. This movie can still be seen on TV and has become a New year’s eve tradition in many households, possibly because this love story (the main characters eventually fall in love), depicts the reality of soviet mass planning and decisions that shaped the lives of millions of people from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.
To understand how this absurd story could somehow be considered a reality, it is important to get an insight into the Soviet Dream and what happened in the Soviet Union after World War II. In short, the main ideology of socialism in the Soviet Union was based on providing welfare for the working class, the so-called proletariat. According to Stalin’s industrialisation plan, many state-owned factories were built in cities, providing work for people who mostly came from remote and rural areas. This started a housing crisis in the Soviet Union because at the same time the Communist Party had declared that every Soviet citizen had a right to live in an apartment with the necessary amenities. However, the reality was far from the dream. Many years after the war millions of people were still living in fast-built wooden barracks without drainage, tap-water, and with toilets on the street, or in communal apartments in pre-war buildings that used to belong to bourgeois but now housed a family in each room. Undoubtedly, there was a need for a fast and cheap solution on how to provide the new soviet people the apartment that they had the right to. Until the 1950s in Soviet Union apartment buildings were built in “Stalin’s style” – neoclassical, monumental brick buildings with ornaments, spacious apartments and quality materials. However, this process was costly and time-consuming. In 1955 The Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a decree that permanently and instantaneously shaped the architectural and
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