Every year on New Year's Eve, at least one TV channel in Russia will show The Irony of Fate, a three-hour movie that was made for TV in 1975.
"It has this slight nostalgia for the Soviet times, when life seems to be easier and simpler," says Olga Fedina, the author of What Every Russian Knows (And You Don't). "There were fewer decisions to be made — all the decisions were kind of made for you."
Those decisions included where you could live, and for city people that meant a flat in one of many identical apartment buildings.
The film begins with an animated sequence, in which an architect is shown finishing his design for a creative and beautiful building. As he takes it to various bureaucrats for approval, it's gradually stripped of every feature that makes it interesting, and reduced to the same rectangular block as every other building.