Soviet Nostalgia Is a Geopolitical Dead End

Foreign Policy · Ani Chkhikvadze · 2026-11-03 17:19 UTC

So-called realists arguing for Ukraine’s surrender can’t let go of the past.

So-called realists arguing for Ukraine’s surrender can’t let go of the past.

Across the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, almost everyone knows The Irony of Fate, a 1976 romantic comedy in which a Moscow surgeon gets drunk at a bathhouse on New Year’s Eve and ends up on a plane to Leningrad. He gives a taxi driver his Moscow address, “Third Builder’s Street,” and arrives at an identical block of flats, where his key opens the door.

The world that the movie describes was once much larger than Russia itself. You could arrive in Kyiv, Tbilisi, or Riga and speak Russian; quote the same Soviet films; laugh at the same jokes; and assume that underneath all the flags, languages, and newly drawn borders there was still some common social and cultural space holding the place together.

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