The film became a box office leader in the USSR in 1963, attracting an audience of 28.8 million viewers. Audiences effectively “voted with their tickets”: in 1964, Cheryomushki ranked ninth at the box office, and in total, nearly 30 million Soviet (and other) citizens saw the film. In this way, a domestic narrative—once confined to citizens’ letters and governmental decrees—made its way into the realm of musical and theatrical art (operetta), and ultimately became part of mass culture (or culture for the masses) in the form of a film musical.
Dmitri Shostakovich publicly praised the film, marking a shift in how he regarded the work he had composed for the operetta back in 1959. While the composer never exaggerated its artistic value, and had experienced considerable dissatisfaction during the theater rehearsals, he eventually came to accept the piece [1]. The cinematic version of Moscow, Cheryomushki proved more convincing and artistically complete than the stage production, benefiting from the use of special effects, editing, and modern scenography. The semantic culmination of the film is a celebratory housewarming scene: the new residents of the building gather in the newlyweds’ apartment to congratulate them. They are overwhelmed with collective joy, which finds expression in a lively polka danced with great enthusiasm. Screenwriter Isaac Glickman recalled that the operetta’s authors were even more pleased with the film adaptation than with the theatrical performance. Nonetheless, Shostakovich never returned to the operetta genre.
Four years passed between the production of the operetta in 1958 and the filming of the movie in 1962—but this does not mean that Soviet media culture remained silent during that time. The idea of mass housing was so captivating that neighborhoods with standardized layouts and identical building projects began appearing in cities across the USSR. It is difficult to determine what had a greater influence on the regional imagination: specialized publications in architecture and the arts that highlighted the success of Moscow’s Cheryomushki; the physical emergence of new residential districts; or media products such as the popular operetta and musical film, which helped shape a new collective vision.
At first glance, Cheryomushki embodies the dream of Soviet progress: young, enthusiastic workers leaving behind overcrowded communal apartments for bright, modern homes. However, through a critical reading of ideology, this “dream” can be seen as concealing the structural impossibility of genuine satisfaction within the Soviet system. The film’s playful, comedic tone operates as a fantasy screen—one that smooths over the grim realities of urbanization, bureaucratic dysfunction, and persistent shortages. The utopia of Cheryomushki becomes a form of “forced pleasure” (or jouissance imposée, as Jacques Lacan put it): the audience is meant to delight in the joy of socialist progress, but the exaggerated cheerfulness only underscores its artificiality [2]. The very need to produce such an overly optimistic musical suggests a latent anxiety about whether the dream actually works.
In the film, we encounter a form of “minor evil”—a redeemable evil, as Catherine Clarke puts it in reference to the narratives of popular socialist realist literature—that manifests in the lingering presence of bourgeois ideology and the bureaucratic structures that delay the realization of communist ideals [3]. Yet bureaucracy is not merely an obstacle to ideology; it is ideology’s very form. In Cheryomushki, the central conflict is not the class struggle or external enemies, but the Kafkaesque absurdity of Soviet administration.
The characters are entangled in a web of petty officials, arbitrary rules, and an impersonal system that ostensibly exists to advance progress, but instead emerges as the main antagonist. In this way, the film inadvertently exposes the inner workings of the Soviet system, becoming a fissure in its own ideological fantasy—a point through which critical insight becomes possible. The obstacles the characters face are not imposed by capitalist foes or foreign saboteurs, but by the very institutions that are meant to empower them. This is a textbook example of how, when pushed to its logical conclusion, an ideological structure begins to reveal its own contradictions.
The overcrowded communal apartments represent the Soviet subject’s past, marked by collectivism and shared constraints. New housing symbolizes the promise of socialist modernity: the emergence of individuality within a collective framework. Yet the film does not portray a genuine transformation of subjectivity—it merely relocates the same problems into a new environment. The musical sequences serve as moments of plus-de-jouir; the characters sing and dance not only to convey happiness, but also to perform compensatory acts that mask the underlying anxiety of a society in transition [4]. The utopian housing project is meant to embody the socialist dream, but its exaggerated representation betrays its unreality. Cheryomushki thus reveals the cracks in the “big Other” of Soviet ideology—the notion of a perfect, harmonious socialist life—only to show that this big Other does not, in fact, guarantee satisfaction. Cheryomushki was not intended as a critique. However, as Slavoj Žižek argues, ideology often reveals itself most clearly in its unintended, unpredictable moments. While the film celebrates socialist modernity, it simultaneously exposes the impossibility of its flawless realization. Its forced optimism, its friction with bureaucratic absurdity, and its relentless musicality all serve to reinforce the ideological message—and yet, paradoxically, they also subtly undermine it from within. This reading of Cheryomushki suggests that the state itself may not fully believe in its own utopia. The film ultimately reveals symptomatic fractures in the Soviet dream of modern housing, exposing the socialist fantasy of progress as one haunted by its own internal failures.
References:
[1] Shostakovich, a composer known for large symphonic forms, reportedly felt discomfort and dissatisfaction when required to write popular music, such as operettas or songs.
[2] The phrase jouissance imposée (“forced pleasure”) resonates with Jacques Lacan’s broader exploration of jouissance—a complex psychoanalytic term combining pleasure, pain, and excess. In Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge (1972–1973), Lacan discusses how the Superego functions not only to forbid desire but paradoxically to command enjoyment, making pleasure a coercive imperative. See: Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore (1972–1973) (B. Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
[3] Clark Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
[4] The term plus-de-jouir (surplus enjoyment) was introduced by Jacques Lacan in Seminar XVI: From the Other to the other (1968–1969). The term echoes Marx’s concept of surplus value, but is applied to libidinal economy. It designates an excessive, uncontainable enjoyment that arises precisely from the structural lack at the heart of the subject’s desire.
In 1961, the USSR’s cinematic authorities approved the idea of adapting the operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki into a film, and the search for a director began. The creators wanted someone with a musical background, so they turned to Herbert Rappaport, a professional musician. Rappaport had gained experience in musical cinema through his participation in Grigori Kozintsev’s Don Quixote (1957, Lenfilm), a renowned Soviet film that received international awards. Interestingly, Rappaport—an ardent admirer of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler—enjoyed the music of the operetta. His idea to adapt the play into a film received support from Nikolai Rabinovich, professor at the Leningrad Conservatory and chief conductor of the local symphony orchestra, who became the conductor for the film’s soundtrack.
In 1963, the musical film Cheryomushki, directed by Herbert Rappaport, was released on Soviet screens. Based on the plot of the operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki, the film brought attention to the “housing issue” in the USSR through an entertaining format. The screenplay was written by Isaac Glickman, while the operetta libretto for the film was penned by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky. The film was edited by Anatoly Nazarov, with music by Dmitri Shostakovich and production design by Marksen Hauchman-Sverdlov. It was officially classified by genre as a “musical play comedy.” According to the plot, a young architect named Lida Baburova and her father arrive to inspect a new building in the Cheremushki district, where she has been allocated an apartment. However, they witness one of the apartment’s walls—thin and fragile—collapse. The reason: the head of the construction trust, who is also a resident of the building, decided to illegally expand his apartment from two rooms to four at the request of his capricious young wife. The story then follows the characters’ struggle for justice, all set to a lively backdrop of songs and dances.