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 1960

Interview with a woman who worked at the Progres factory together with parents and sister.

Electron employee, born 1951

Interview with a woman who worked at Electron on the assembly line, soldering filters, and later drew diagrams and kept various technical documentation.

MG Promin and Polyaron employee, born 1941

Interview with a woman who moved from Promin to Polyaron and worked there untill 1980.

Daughter of Mayak employee, born 1954

Interview with a woman about her father who was shoemaker before WWII and in Soviet times went to work at the Mayak clothing factory.

Lvivprylad employee, born 1953

Interview with a man who worked as a rate setter at Lvivprylad in 1980-2003.

Polyaron and Iskra employee, born 1956

Interview with a woman who worked at Polyaron (1975-1978) and desperately wanted to change job.

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