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.

Avtobusprom employee, born 1952

Zoom-interview with a man who currently works at the Avtobusprom administration and as a chair of the department of the Lviv Polytechnic.

Polyaron employee, born 1934

Interview with a man who had different positions at the Polyaron for almost 30 years – from 1960 to 1989. His wife was his work colleague.

Avtonavantazhuvach employee, born 1948

Interview with a man who came to the Forklift Factory as a worker in a foundry after school and developed career to a position of director.

Electron employee, born 1952

Interview with a man who worked in the Design Bureau on the special appliances and had senior positions at the Electron production association and subsidiary companies.

Polyaron employee, born 1956

Interview with a woman who worked in a kindergarten managed by the Polyaron from 1983 to 1989.

LAZ employee, born 1931

Interview with a man who was a deputy chief technologist, a chief welder, then deputy chief engineer and a chief engineer at LAZ.

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