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.

Progres employee, born 1948

Interview with a woman who works at the Progres Medical Center since early 1990s.

Lvivprylad employee, born 1956

Interview with a man born in Lviv who worked at the Lvivprylad plant since 1975.

Avtonavantazhuvach employee, born 1954

Interview with a man who worked as a design engineer in the truck body design bureau and chief designer at the production facility of Forklift Plant.

Electron employee, born 1956

Interview with a man who worked as a fitting assembler and adjuster and later as technologist at Electron until 1995.

Sklozavod employee, born 1952

Interview with a woman who for the last 15 years has been working in the art shop as a decorator of Christmas decorations.

Polyaron employee, born 1947

Interview with a man who after school was sent as a locksmith to a mechanical repair shop at Polyaron.

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