The Germans Create "Kyiv": Trophy Technologies in Postwar Soviet Ukraine
Gennadii Kazakevych
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.28.1.2026
Conference Room of the Center for Urban History
We are pleased to invite you to the first lecture of the fourth season of the public series "Let’s Have a City."
After World War II, the Soviet state tried to “appropriate” German technology. Entire factories, equipment, engineers, and technical specialists from Germany were taken to the USSR. However, is it possible to set up mass production of high-tech devices in a city ravaged by war in just one year?
Gennadii Kazakevych's lecture will reveal one of the most interesting and at the same time little-known episodes of postwar history: the launch of the Kyiv camera production in the capital of Soviet Ukraine. It was on the basis of the legendary Carl Zeiss Contax cameras that the Kyiv Arsenal plant began to produce new Soviet photographic equipment. The enterprise, which occupied a special place in Bolshevik mythology, was supposed to become a showcase for the postwar reconstruction of the Ukrainian SSR. However, Soviet leaders wanted to keep some of the project's specifics behind the scenes.
Who were the German engineers who worked in Kyiv under the supervision of the Soviet secret services? In what conditions did they live and work, and how did their fates unfold? What did technology transfer look like in Soviet realities? And why did the project, which was considered a great technological triumph, end up being useless?
The lecture will combine the history of technology, photography, and everyday life to show how great political ambitions coexist with the reality of production, the market, and human experience.
The event will be moderated by Bohdan Shumylovych.
Historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor of the Department of Art History at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Author of research on the history and culture of the Ancient Celts and their influence on the territory of Ukraine. Since 2016, he has been studying the history of photography. He is the author of the monograph “City of Light and Shadow: Early History of Kyiv Photography, 1850s-1920s” (Antikvar, 2025). Participant of the project “Ukrainian History: Global Initiative” project. Scientific adviser on the Ukrainian side of the joint Ukrainian-Swiss project “Testing the Soviet Utopia: Social History of Technology in Ukraine, 1922-1991”. 
Gennadii Kazakevych
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
The public series "Let's Have a City" offers different perspectives and approaches to the study of the modern city and private histories. In the series, researchers share the results of their studies, showing the changes in social fabric and relationships, materiality and technology, symbolic meanings and ideological manifestations, and everyday practices and decisions.
Credits
Cover Image: A group of photojournalists on Khreshchatyk, all with cameras “Kyiv”, 1954 / Central State Audiovisual and Electronic Archive