This Day in Labor History: July 10, 1989
By 
On July 10, 1989 Soviet coal miners struck over their low wages and unsafe conditions. This was the most important internal labor uprising contributing to the fall of the Soviet Union.
The great irony of state socialism in practice is that workers had no rights. As the state claimed to represent them, their own needs as workers had to play a subservient role to the larger revolution. But the larger revolution rarely actually cared about workers that much, at least not in terms of their needs and demands. That doesn’t mean communist nations ignored the working class broadly–most really did prioritize providing the basics for workers. But when you place yourself and your government as the only legitimate representative of the working class, any actual worker dissent is counterrevolutionary. This is of course rife with problems and as the Soviets demonstrated during the Kronstadt Rebellion, worker resistance to the Soviet government would be met with maximum violence,
By the 1980s, the Soviet economy was crumbling rapidly. In response, the Soviets placed even more pressure on its coal miners to work harder and longer. In 1980, the Brezhnev government abolished the standard day off that was the one thing coal miners had a right to. In 1987, the Gorbachev government began placing pressure on coal miners to work evenings and weekends for no additional money. Meanwhile, coal miners lived an average of 50 years. Conditions were quite unsafe, black lung was a severe problem, and accidents happened way too often given the available technologies to prevent them that had been introduced on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
At the same time, Gorbachev had opened up room for criticism of local officials through his perestroika campaign. The local thugs who ruled the coal industry were super corrupt apparatchiks, looking out for themselves primarily. The Soviets still looked at worker activism with great suspicion, dealing with their client state in Poland and its Solidarity movement based out of the Gdansk shipyards that threatened the future of communism there. Meanwhile, one way the Soviets had dealt with its inability to compensate workers properly was to allow them to steal stuff from the job, on the down low. But then the government, focused on efficiency to at least some extent, cracked down on that.
Beginning in February 1989, coal miners at various sites around the Soviet Union began small strikes. No one is quite sure how this began or even the proximate causes. These were real small actions. Naturally, workers were angry but knew not to push too hard at first.
On July 10, the big strike began in remote Mezhdurechensk, Kemerovo Oblast. This probably happened because after one shift, the filthy workers wanted to clean themselves and discovered that there wasn’t even soap at the mine. This was just too much. This quickly spread through the Kuznetsk Basin and then to the larger Soviet Union. The workers began to make demands on the state. First, they wanted higher wages. Second, they wanted accountability from the government and the right to criticize it. Not surprisingly, this quickly moved from focusing on the wages to focusing on the larger political demands. The Soviet government didn’t know how to handle this. Some wanted to encourage the workers to play a greater role in the state, while others wanted to see it repressed.
On July 20, the Soviets sent a commission to Donetsk, in Ukraine, another center of the strikes. Gorbachev was in a conciliatory mood and basically gave the workers everything they asked for. But for other miners, that wasn’t enough. See, they simply didn’t trust the state. Would you? So the miners in the rest of the Soviet Union had one additional demand–they wanted the changes codified into law. The Soviet government agreed to this and the strikes ended by July 27.
But this hardly ended the issues. The workers were still cranky. For the rest of the year, there were tiny strikes or calls for larger strikes, though nothing really bubbled over. The biggest issues were in Ukraine, where reformist politicians aligned themselves with the workers. It became a way to criticize the sclerotic government in Moscow with some cover.
Of course, what was really happening here was the slow collapse of the Soviet state. The problems it faced were simply inherent to the state’s contradictions and while Gorbachev tried everything he could, it was just too far gone without doing the one thing he would not, which was widespread military clampdown. Gorbachev did replace Volodymyr Shcherbytsky as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Shcherbytsky was an old-time Stalinist and part of the same generation of old men holding onto power like Democratic Party leadership in the 2020s. He just wasn’t going to go away and he was totally unresponsive to the workers demands. Gorbachev sacked him in September and replaced him with someone from the mining industry. Naturally enough, Shcherbytsky died the next year.
In October, a strike leader named Aleksandr Sotnikov was investigating corruption among Soviet mining leaders in Ukraine. Someone killed him. Gorbachev immediately urged the miners not to strike, promising a serious investigation and he probably meant it. The workers backed down on a planned October 31 strike in protest. But in 1990, they founded a union called Independent Union of Miners. The sheer existence of a union outside of state control was a sign of how fall communism had fallen in the Soviet Union already.
The Gorbachev administration had no real ability to deal with any of these fundamental problems as the Soviet Union was falling apart. The fall of the. Berlin Wall demonstrated for just about everyone that things were changing in eastern Europe mighty fast. By 1991, the now pretty organized workers struck again, demanding Gorbachev’s resignation, the end of the Congress of People’s Deputies, and more traditional worker demands such as higher wages. Gorbachev considered all options, including using the military, but he chose not to. In the end, the miners revolt was far for the only reason for the end of the Soviet Union that year, but it contributed mightily toward it. Whether things got better for coal miners in these regions in the years after 1991 is a whole other question, but certainly one can see why and how they would be activated like this. Of course such actions would have been impossible just a few years before because of fear of the state, which had collapsed under Gorbachev.
This is the 571th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.