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Subject essay: Lewis Siegelbaum

The second and last all-Union strike of coal miners was declared in early March 1991 and suspended two months later. Not only in its longer duration but in many other respects it differed from the strike of July 1989. Thanks to the miners’ prodigious organizational activity in the interim, a multitude of institutions -- city and regional strike/workers' committees, the Union of Kuzbass Workers considered by the CIA as “the most successful independent union in the USSR,” the Confederation of Labor formed in April 1990, and the Independent Union of Miners (NPG) that was founded six months later -- were involved in generating demands that the striking miners pursued. During the first strike, the miners had rejected assistance from outside; now their leaders worked closely, if surreptitiously, with the so-called "democrats" ranged around Gorbachev's rival, Boris Eltsin, and solicited and received funds from other independent trade unions, political movements, and the general public. Whereas in 1989 the miners were wary of provoking repression, in 1991 they boldly called for Gorbachev's resignation, the dismantling of the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, and the transfer of mines and their assets to respective republican governments. But also in contrast to 1989, participation by individual mines was spotty, and there were few mass meetings of miners on public squares.

The strike, precipitated by inflation that had all but wiped out previous wage increases, was both a reflection of and a further impetus to the decline of the Soviet "center." Gorbachev's announcement in early April of a doubling of miners' wages (albeit in stages and with certain provisos concerning productivity) and other concessions was dismissed by strike leaders as inadequate and, in view of their political demands, irrelevant. Only after they had concluded agreements with the republican governments did they terminate the strike. In retrospect, the strike of 1991 proved to be the high-water mark of working-class militancy and political effectiveness. In Russia, the leaders of the NPG and regional councils of workers' committees threw their weight behind Boris Eltsin in the presidential election of June 1991 and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in his clashes with the Russian Supreme Soviet, but had little to show for their support. In Ukraine, miners voted overwhelmingly for independence in the referendum of December 1, 1991, but soon discovered that, as one activist put it, "The Center has just moved from Moscow to Kiev."

The miners’ movement remained militant and remarkably united after the breakup of the USSR. Provoked by both the Ukrainian and Russian governments’ failure to ensure timely payment of wages and reinvestment in mining infrastructure, about a million Donbas miners (80 percent of the total employed) and half a million (about 50 percent) in the Kuzbass struck in February 1996. The strike was well coordinated and even inspired some 250,000 teachers in Russia to strike in sympathy. Yet, despite promises extracted from the two governments, wage payments lagged and in July some 200,000 mineworkers shut down rail and road transport around Donetsk in protest. All the while and for the remainder of the economically catastrophic 1990s, the demand for coal shrank and consequently so did output- in Russia, from 425 million tons in 1988 to 232 million ten years later, and in Ukraine from 165 million in 1990 to less than half that amount in 2000

Something of a revival in the industry occurred in Russia under Vladimir Putin. Experts credit the formation in 2001 of the Siberian Coal Energy Company (SUEK), a large holding company which invested in long-overdue modernizing of equipment. By 2019, Russia’s coal output reached an unprecedented figure of 440 million tons. A reasonably well remunerated and for the most part quiescent labor force produced the impressive result. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, national production stagnated. Already antiquated in Soviet times and woefully short of capital, the Donbas mining industry saw little improvement in safety or efficiency in post-Soviet decades. Zasiadko, one of Donetsk’s mines, became notorious when in 2007 an explosion killed 101 miners and another in 2015 resulted in the deaths of 17. Total national output stagnated in the new millennium at between 72 and 85 million tons before plummeting after 2014 when much of the region became contested between the government in Kyiv and separatists backed by Russia. In 2020, nearly 30 years after the momentous strike of 1991, the Independent Union of Ukrainian Miners (NPGU) organized a strike over unpaid wages (again!) and the Zelensky government’s plans to privatize mines remaining in state hands. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further complicated the situation.

17 Moments in Soviet History - The Miners' Strike of 1991, by Lewis Siegelbaum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.