Industrial biographies of the city, Interview

Industrial biographies of the city

Lviv is rarely described as an industrial city, although dozens of big plants and smaller factories and workshops used to operate here in the 1950/80s. Production facilities attracted new people to the city that added new residential neighborhoods, medical, pre-school, educational, and cultural places. We are collecting biographies of labor – they are not only about work but about people who made friends, started their families, entertained, and lived side by side in factory managed multi-apartment blocs. The collection of interviews currently includes 59 interviews. The interviewers represent workers from the plants of LAZ (Lviv Bus Manufacturing Plant), Fork Truck Plant, Poliaron, Mikroprylad, “Avtobusprom” Institute of Bus Building, and ”Promin” production facility. During the conversations, we focus on the time span from the 1950s to early 2000s. We started accumulating the interviews in February, 2021, and plan to continue by the end of the year. The talks are using the semi-structured in-depth biographical interview method. The average duration is 2 hours, or longer. Questions start from the childhood memories of storytellers, and reflections on the city. They cover the period of working at a company, relations with colleagues, political activities, job safety, and environment-related issues. A big part of the questionnaire is about receiving apartments from factories, cultural leisure time (amateur performances, concerts of pop stars, theater going, cinema going, etc.) organized by the enterprise, vacations at recreation centers, in sanatoria, and in pioneer camps. The concluding bloc of questions covers the period of Perestroika and the early 1990s. For many storytellers the time brought unemployment or re-training for new occupations; others managed to continue at the company that overcame the crisis, or started their own businesses. The interviews are conducted by Myroslava Liakhovych, as part of the “Unarchiving of post-industry” project designed to collect, digitalize, and build archives of industrial epoch, such as about Lviv. The collection is illustrated by a photo from a production shop at the Fork Trucks Plant, courtesy of Stepan Misinskyi.

Electron employee, born 1941

Interview with a man who has been working at Electron at various positions between 1959 and 1997.

Microprylad employee, born 1938

Interview with a woman who worked as a rater and later as an economist in the production department of the plant.

Electron employee, born 1946

Interview with a man whose career was connected to Electron: he had positions from a designer to the he head of the main production department.

Mayak employee, born 1971

Interview with a woman who came to the "Mayak" as a drafter and now she is working as the head of the design department.

Miasokombinat employee, born 1966

Interview with a woman who worked as a sausage casing maker. The woman described in detail the process of work in the shop, and the hard work.

Sklozavod employee, born 1938

Interview with a man where he talks about the specifics of working at the Glassworks, about being in leadership positions, and about various cases under his leadership.

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