TV News from a Lviv Television Studio in the 1960s

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, newly built social housing neighborhoods in several Soviet cities were referred to as cheryomushki [“cheryomushky,” according to Ukr. Translation – tr.note], named after the widely publicized and popular housing experiment in Moscow. The resolution of the so-called “housing issue” and the media coverage surrounding it consistently went hand in hand. In Lviv, the term cheryomushky first appeared in a 1960 television story, which described the emergence of low-rise residential buildings constructed since 1957. These were designed by Heinrich Shvetsky-Vinetsky and Lyudmyla Nivina and marked the city’s first wave of modern housing development. Lviv researchers note that the mass construction of high-rise housing began after the broadcast of a 1962–1963 television story about the “Lviv Cheryomushky,” featuring projects by architects Oleh Radomskyi and Liubomyr Korolyshyn. This shift significantly transformed the postwar city’s landscape (Henega, 2012). In the TV report discussed below, city plans filmed and aired on local television depicted the building of a new neighborhood in Lviv (in the area of what is now Pasichna Street), developed between 1957 and 1959, with a second wave of construction following in 1962–1965. The visuals followed a familiar formula: shots of buildings, construction workers laying bricks, cranes in operation, and a foreman interviewed on site.

The next installment titled Lviv Cheryomushky aired in 1964 and presented a more complex narrative. The cameraman opened with sweeping views of Lviv filmed from the cabin of a trolleybus—a symbol of Soviet modernization—before shifting quickly to footage of the newly built housing. The neighborhood was shown in motion, with dynamic camera shots from moving vehicles. This sense of energy was reinforced by scenes of numerous new buildings, landscaped grounds, and young trees, all carefully arranged to demonstrate progress. The film emphasized that in Lviv, new housing developments were conceived as parts of broader urban complexes integrated with industrial production. Public transportation—embodied by the trolleybus—played a central role, shuttling residents from residential “sleeping areas” to production sites.

One scene zooms in on the sign for Kindergarten No. 89, located in the Leninskyi district (now Yaroshynska Street, off Pasichna Street in the Lychakivskyi district). It was likely built with funds from local industrial enterprises. We see cheerful children learning in front of a monument to young Lenin. In the Soviet teleology of the “bright future,” children represented the promise of a happy life made possible through the triumph of socialism. The appearance of Lenin’s monument underscores who was credited with bringing this vision to life. The camera then shows newly constructed factory buildings, workers paving roads and landscaping the area—depicting the construction of a new Lviv, a city of industry and socialist modernity. The film concludes in a style reminiscent of Dziga Vertov, with a dramatic shot of a construction crane filling the entire frame.

According to the logic of socialist construction, a house could be built much like a car—on an assembly line. Construction materials were prefabricated in factories and assembled on-site, a method that echoed the dream of French avant-garde architect Le Corbusier, who envisioned a technologically organized city where homes, like machines, were mass-produced. Lviv television viewers were introduced to this process in a February 17, 1962 broadcast titled Houses on an Assembly Line, aired at the onset of the city’s second construction wave. By the 1970s, the approach to new neighborhood development had evolved slightly, though the core principles remained: cost-efficiency (often at the expense of quality), minimalism in design, large-scale prefab construction, and integration into the natural landscape.