THE EMERGENCE OF PHARMACEUTICAL PRODUCTION AT DARNYTSIA IN THE POSTWAR DECADES

Abstract

This article examines the postwar development of the Darnytsia Chemical-Pharmaceutical Plant as a microhistorical case of Soviet industrial modernization in the Ukrainian SSR. It asks how a small branch enterprise became a pharmaceutical producer and what this trajectory reveals about the institutional logic, technological limits, and social consequences of modernization in the 1950s and 1960s. Particular attention is paid to the links between production growth, imported equipment, and labor in a hazardous environment.
The study draws on factory reports, planning documents, explanatory notes, and union records to reconstruct the plant’s transformation. It argues that the expansion of the 1950s was predominantly extensive: output grew mainly through workforce growth while production remained constrained by raw-material shortages, packaging disruptions, irregular supply chains, and chronic underinvestment in infrastructure. At the same time, the enterprise moved beyond its original organotherapeutic profile and became a site for producing a broader range of pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics and synthetic drugs. In the 1960s, modernization accelerated through workshops and imported machinery for ampoule filling and packaging.
Rather than treating modernization as a linear success story, the article shows that technical progress coexisted with persistent structural weakness. New equipment and expanded capacity did not remove the bottlenecks created by deteriorating buildings, fragile support systems, and poor working conditions. The plant’s achievements were tied to a high social cost, evident in the predominance of low-paid female labor, recurring problems with ventilation and water supply, and high workforce turnover. Darnytsia’s postwar history therefore offers a revealing example of Soviet modernization shaped by industrial ambition and systemic constraint.