as Tanya, Nadya's friend Aleksandr Belyavsky as Sasha, Zhenya's friend Gotlib Roninson as man at the airport Eldar Ryazanov as Zhenya's fellow passenger on board Lyubov Sokolova as Olga Nikolayevna, Nadya's mother Soundtrack After reading the script, composer Mikael Tariverdiev was puzzled by its genre diversity. As a result, he defined it for himself as a Christmas fairy tale, and for musical accompaniment he chose eight romances - "about love, about happiness, about jealousy, about kindness, about the desire to be understood" - which at first sound like a sharp counterpoint to what is happening on the screen, but then "scissors between the sound and the picture converged". The soundtrack for The Irony of Fate was partly released on Mikael Tariverdiev's LP in 1976 by Melodiya. A full soundtrack was released in 2009 by Bomba Music (Russia) and in 2016 by Earth (UK). Male vocals are mostly performed by Sergey Nikitin, female vocals — by Alla Pugacheva. Reception The two consecutive episodes of The Irony of Fate were originally broadcast by the Soviet central television channel, Programme One, on 1 January 1976, at 18:00. The film was a resounding success with audiences: author Fedor Razzakov recalled that "virtually the entire country watched the show"; the number of viewers was estimated to have been about 100 million. In response to popular demand, the feature had a first re-run on 7 February. By 1978, after several further broadcasts of the picture, the accumulated number of viewers for all of the showings including the first was estimated at 250 million. A shortened 155 minute version was released to cinemas on August 16, 1976; which sold 7 million tickets. The readers of Sovetskii Ekran, the official publication of the State Committee for Cinematography, voted The Irony of Fate as the best film of 1976, and chose Andrey Myagkov as the best actor of the year. In 1977, Ryazanov, Braginsky, cinematographer Vladimir Nakhabtsev, composer Mikael Tariverdiev and actors Barbara Brylska and Myagkov were all awarded the USSR State Prize in recognition of their participation in making the film. George Faraday commented that while it was basically a happy ending romantic comedy, The Irony of Fate had a "socially critical undertone." It could be interpreted as an "explicit commentary... On the soulless uniformity of the Soviet urban landscape". Simultaneously, however, critics accused the director of creating an escapist film which allowed the Soviet audience to turn