“[…] What’s typical of the yeast industry? When there’s a crisis in the country, people buy more yeast because they bake more bread and make more moonshine. Not everyone can afford to buy ready-made bread or horilka, for example. By and large, we had everything back then. One characteristic of that period was that we never left work empty-handed. These barter arrangements—I’ll give you yeast for sugar, for butter, for meat—meant our trucks started driving to Crimea, transporting yeast from Kherson to Mykolaiv to Simferopol, and returning during the vegetable season with tomatoes, peppers, watermelons, and potatoes. In other words, they never came back empty. Back then, we still had four of our own trucks and a transport division. Now we basically use hired transport, but back then, to avoid returning empty, we’d bring back goods. We always came back with full bags: butter, meat, horilka, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers. The union actually organized these groups more than once; it was just the workers themselves who handled everything. They were given the scales, the invoice, “here’s the price, here’s the quantity, go sell.” And we sold it ourselves. There were people who helped load things. If it was potatoes, for example, they helped fill the sacks—using big 100 kg scales, not the small ones. If we sold meat or chickens, there were those old scales, but everything was there, as they say […]
[…] Coffee grinders, small household items like Belarusian knitwear—oh my! People would come to us and bring all sorts of suits and clothes […] The main thing was that the prices were reasonable, and since you couldn’t buy anything in a store or even at the market, they brought everything to us here […]
[…] We did pay, but at the minimum price—practically at cost or at the price agreed upon by one manager with another… We didn’t resell it to anyone; we used it, ate it, fed the children, gave some to Mom, Dad, sister, and so on if needed, and shared it with whoever we could […]
[…] We never had any salary delays. At first, everyone still lined up at the cashier’s desk to receive their pay, which created a commotion in the office and discomfort for the economists and accountants. Then, for the first time—I don’t remember the exact year—they introduced the card system for us and started depositing our paychecks, I think into Kredobank. Maybe it wasn’t the first bank to deal with it, I don’t quite remember. Anyway, we got a card, and money was put on the card. They installed an ATM at the entrance; everything was just great. We were so happy—no need to stand in line anywhere […]”
(Employee of the Lviv Yeast Factory since 1984)
“[…] In 1993, our factory was probably the first in Lviv to be privatized. We were part of the first wave of privatization. We were bought out by a Lviv company called Galimpex, which acquired our factory at auction. We couldn’t raise the necessary funds to bid ourselves—people just didn’t want to contribute. So, in ’93, we were bought out. We didn’t really feel any of that, because we kept working the whole time, even as places closed down here and there. We continued because we produced goods that furniture companies needed and made Christmas tree decorations, which were always in demand—without them, children wouldn’t like any holiday, either Christmas or New Year’s. We always had work; we didn’t stand idle for a single day. Even after privatization, we kept the same pace. The company that privatized us had ties abroad—Galimpex was focused on buying and selling. Back then, they traded with China: mineral fertilizers went there, batteries came back. They made a profit from that, and they already had money saved up from doing business long before they bought us. With that capital, they started reaching out to foreign partners to establish exports. An American acquaintance of our late director came to see us, and we agreed to move forward. He reviewed our products and liked what he saw, so we began preparing export shipments. It was challenging because we didn’t have the required packaging. Each item needed its own individual packaging—or at least groups of four or six, with boxes and dividers. We created inserts for each Christmas tree ornament, with small bases and slots to ensure the ornaments fit securely. That made packing easier. Then we needed larger boxes to ship those smaller ones; we packed them into standard shipping cartons. Once everything was ready, we loaded it into a shipping container, brought it to the factory, and shipped it to America, where it was transshipped by sea—maybe from Odesa, I think, onto a steamship bound for America. Expansion followed. We went to Poland a couple of times to see how things were done there, since that industry was already developed. The director—though not the same one anymore, as he had appointed his protégé as director—joined me, along with the chief artist, who was a woman, and the deputy director. The new director was twenty years younger than me. The three of us went to Poland to learn from their experience. Afterward, our horizons broadened; everyone saw firsthand what things should look like, and they had been exporting for a long time. Little by little, we gradually captured the European market—the Netherlands, Germany, even Poland bought from us, sending their own products to secondary markets while we tried to sell ours there. America followed. Many European countries bought from us, and that continues to this day. To this day, exports are the main focus. The mirror workshop eventually ceased to exist […]”
(Glass Factory Employee, 1970s–2012)
“[…] Later on, the plant no longer had those kinds of tasks—it was already in Ukraine—and its main output became about 8,000 of those devices per month. The device was called a recorder. If you’ve ever seen a power plant control room with a wall full of those devices, those were the ones. It had a screen, a tape running across it, and a pen that recorded various temperatures and so on. The design dated back to the 1960s, from Leningrad. There was also a military order […]”
(Employee of Lvivprylad, 1980–2003)
“[…] So the domestic market started to falter and eventually collapsed; we had to keep the team together and maintain the equipment, which was constantly being refurbished. Everything was scaling back, and we were switching to tolling arrangements and contract schemes. The domestic market survived on small orders sourced from those contracts. To be honest, developing a new model was expensive, but dealing with the weaving mills—especially Cheksil in Chernihiv, our main supplier—was even more challenging. They required payment, prepayment for three months, plus there were issues with fabric quality and other factors. All this made the product very expensive. Since we targeted the average buyer, profits were actually low, and the team was large—we had to keep tailors and seamstresses on staff. It’s a very specific system; if you’ve spoken to them, you’ve seen how it works. It’s like a clockwork mechanism that has to run smoothly; if something falls out of place, that sense of time and space—and, most importantly, of earnings—just falls apart. That’s why I later shifted my focus. There were people with their own fabric, and management decided it was much more convenient—if someone wanted something, we couldn’t refuse, since we hadn’t had that option or the time before. There’s a workshop here, and back then I did custom tailoring—fittings, making the garment, the person would pay, we’d accept the fabric via receipt, and basically, everything worked that way—through the receipt, and in the end, she could buy the item and be satisfied […]”
(Artist at the Mayak company 1987)
“[…] When the factory was sold to Churkin, 45 percent of the workforce had to be laid off, and I was among them. I came from what you could call a well-off family. My husband had a job, and my family received decent pensions. We all lived together; no one kept track of who brought in how much money or how much each person contributed to the common pot, so to speak. Everyone knew I lived comfortably, that I was well-off. But there were men with three children to support, and single people with no one to help them financially. So, they were looking for someone to let go. They offered me a position as a designer of a lower rank, a lower category. For some reason, I thought this was just a temporary situation in our country; I believed everything would work out, that all the enterprises, factories, and institutes would continue to operate. I just didn’t want my employment record to go from first-category designer to third-category designer. It felt as if they’d dumped me somewhere, who knows where. I don’t think that way now, but back then I wasn’t as worldly-wise, let’s put it that way. Maybe I should have agreed. But I said, “No, I don’t want a lower position.” So they let me go. When I picked up my employment record book, as I’ve already told you, it hurt so much. It hurt because that was my life. Back then, I couldn’t imagine how I could do something different—look for another job, somehow not be a designer. I didn’t know what else I could be. When I was picking up my employment record book, I couldn’t take it anymore and started crying—I’m so sensitive—and the women in human resources looked at me and said, “Why are you crying? It’s not the end…” At first, I was at the employment office, then they suggested I get a second degree, so I went to the Zoo Academy and finished a Marketing program. It’s the Economics Department, but the profession is a marketer. I graduated again and now have a second degree. But, unfortunately, when I came back to the job center with this diploma, they told me, “I’m sorry, but we have so many specialists who just graduated from college and need to start working right now, and you don’t fit in anymore—go find something else.” I didn’t lose my head. Even before that, while I was still working as a designer, I was already interested in alternative medicine and practicing it. I attended various lectures. Academics and professors would come from Moscow, from the academy, and give lectures. I started signing up with distribution companies that deal with biologically active supplements. I’m still doing that today. So I started studying herbs and homeopathy. I was involved in that—I can say I was making money, but the distributors weren’t officially registered; they worked unofficially […]
[…] A friend of mine started her own business—something that had nothing to do with technology. It was trendy back then, or rather, people were starting their own businesses because they couldn’t make a living at the factories; things were already falling apart in the early 1990s. She also lost her job at Electron. She had some start-up capital and opened a business making knitted goods—various knitted items. She designed them, and I handled the technical side. She was the director, and I was the deputy director. I worked for one year as deputy director at that company […]”
(Designer at Avtobusprom and LAZ, 1970–2000)
“[…] It was a difficult situation. The suppliers providing components for bus manufacturing were scattered across different parts of the Soviet Union. When everything fell apart, we had to act quickly to ensure the parts we needed could be produced somewhere within Ukraine—the closer, the better. That was quite difficult. You can’t just whip up things like engines and axles for buses on the fly; you have to set up production facilities, train staff, and so on. There were attempts—some failed, some succeeded. We managed to set up production in the Kharkiv oblast and started some things here in Lviv as well. But it’s such a complex process. Looking back, I think some decisions were made deliberately to complicate matters and break up large workforces. That played a role, but there were also local oligarchs gradually gaining power, and nothing was resolved as quickly as it should have been. Take the bus factory, for example: it had everything needed to produce various models, with no need for extra facilities. Yet, due to a lack of coordinated state policy, the factory was sold to the Russians. The Churkin brothers, who became the owners, set up companies. I think the money went to the Russian state apparatus. One of them […]”
(Deputy Technical Director of LAZ, 1986–1997)
“[…] When the plant was operating, it needed to be expanded, maintained, and equipped with new machinery. There were skilled specialists working there. At that time, everyone who came brought their own equipment; they’d send our people for six months of training, teach them, and send them back. When our 14th workshop was being built, the Germans wanted to install equipment capable of performing 15 or 18 operations—I don’t remember exactly. They planned to take our staff to Germany for six months of training. The idea was that one worker, instead of 18, would operate the new machine, dramatically increasing productivity. That was their approach. […] As for visitors, we had Soroka, the director of the Lviv administration department, Mstyslav […] —he was highly sought after by the Poles. But we needed to create the right conditions for them. Neither the city administration, the city council, nor anyone else […] seemed to care. Indeed […] money was needed …”
(Economist and Director of the Poliaron Production Association, 1983–2011)
“[…] It was 1994—four years after Ukraine gained independence. The factory was still operating, but things kept getting worse, and in 1994 there were massive layoffs. They hadn’t laid off the shop floor workers yet, but they were cutting back on support staff: the technical control department, all the labs—because there was no money left. When they started telling us, ‘You can leave; we’re not firing you, but we won’t be paying you,’ I had to decide what to do. A lot of people faced the same choice, not just me. I thought to myself, I’m not close to retirement yet—if I leave, who knows what I’ll find? Those were tough times. I made my decision, as did many of my colleagues: we stayed on. We didn’t get paid, but we were still officially listed as working. I actually worked there until ’94, and then in ’97 they finally laid us off when the plant went completely bankrupt […] They sent me to the employment office and registered me there, but unfortunately, I stayed there from ’97 to 2001, until I turned sixty […] I went there regularly to check in, because otherwise they wouldn’t have paid me. If I had just not bothered, they would have told me to stay home, but they had to pay me because they couldn’t offer me a job […]”
(Electron employee, 1959–1997)
“[…] In ’91, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everything became much more complicated because enterprises started closing. In my opinion, it wasn’t just occasional worries, those thoughts were always with us: would the enterprise survive or shut down? Thanks to the management’s actions, we held on, but with heavy losses—people lost their jobs and were laid off, searching for income that wasn’t there. For more than twenty years now, we’ve been working with a German company on a tolling basis. The German side owns the raw materials and provides the orders; our job is simply to do the work and get paid accordingly. That’s how it’s been to this day: there’s a client, there’s work, there’s payment […]
[…] Those ’90s, when you’d go to work hoping to get in, only to find a huge padlock on the gate. Those memories stayed with us for a long time. Just a handful of people were left, scraping by and waiting to see what would happen next. Thank God, things eventually turned around, and I think a lot of people came back once work resumed […]
[…] There were [salary delays]—and what delays they were! The same product sat in the warehouses, and there was no heating; we sat in the cold. Since a company is considered operational, it has to submit reports and everything else. There was some meager production, but it wasn’t what you’d call real manufacturing—we just survived as best we could. Then, little by little, we started getting back on our feet, and we’re still standing […]”
(Employee of the Progress Production Association since 1981)
The materials presented here are excerpts from interviews with workers in Lviv’s radio-electronic, machine-building, processing, light, and food industries. These interviews are part of the Un/Archiving Post/Industry project, carried out in 2020–2021, which aimed to collect surviving materials related to the industrial heritage of the Lviv and Donetsk regions and to foster dialogue between generations, regions, and institutions. The recorded bibliographic conversations have been incorporated into the Urban Media Archive’s oral history collection, “Industrial Biographies of the City.” This collection preserves respondents’ memories and reflections on their childhoods and families, the city, education, work, and society, dating back to the 1950s.
The following selection of quotes covers the period of Perestroika, the 1990s, and the early 2000s, bringing together respondents’ accounts of changes in people’s lives against the backdrop of the transition from a planned to a market economy and the economic crisis intensified by the collapse of the USSR in 1991. People quickly became familiar with concepts such as “barter,” “wage arrears,” “production cuts,” “part-time employment,” “forced leave,” “layoffs,” “job centers,” and “retraining.”
The transition to a market economy required a shift in ownership from state to private hands. Privatization in Ukraine, under the certificate model, began in 1992 with the adoption of the Laws of Ukraine “On the Privatization of the State Housing Fund” and “On the Privatization of State Property.” Every citizen received a privatization property certificate (voucher) that allowed them to purchase a share in an enterprise. To implement privatization policy, the State Property Fund of Ukraine was established and operated in accordance with an annually updated State Program.
Amid a sharp decline in the standard of living for most citizens, demand for the buying and selling of property certificates arose, and the authorities permitted mass purchases. As a result, securities became concentrated in the hands of enterprise managers and businessmen, many of whom were from the former Communist Party elite. At the same time, the state’s regulatory role in privatization intensified. Under these conditions, the phenomenon of the oligarchy emerged. Since the early 2000s, business groups connected to the government have participated in the privatization of strategic industrial sectors, natural monopolies, and production infrastructure. Changes in ownership at these facilities often occurred in a non-transparent manner, with significant violations and the subsequent liquidation of enterprises.
It is important to note that the interview materials are organized into several groups based on industry and the timing of ownership changes. The Lviv Glass and Mirror Factory and the yeast factory were privatized by 1995 and quickly gained access to investment, maintaining and expanding their sales markets. Enterprises in the machine-building and radio-electronic industries remained state-owned until the 2000s, which prevented them from carrying out a full technical overhaul and maintaining their market positions (for example, Lvivprylad supplied equipment for nuclear power plants). Respondents reflect on ineffective management and missed opportunities, and complain about the new owners who dismantled production.