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 worked at various Lviv plants: Tools Factory, Forklift Factory, Mikroprylad plant, Telegraph Equipment Plant, and Electron.

Avtonavantazhuvach employee, born 1944

Interview with a man whose career is connected with the Forklift Factory: from setting up lathes to management positions.

Enzyme employee, born 1954

Interview with a man, who worked at Enzyme between 1982 and 2021.

Avtobusprom employee, born 1955

Interview with a man who worked for Avtobusprom during different periods in history of this enterprise: from successful times to crisis.

Enzyme employee, born 1964

Interview with a woman who has been working at the Enzyme plant since 1984 and now is a deputy director.

Progres employee, born 1957

Interview with a woman who workes as an accountant at the Progres factory since 1981.

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