| dc.description | Since 2010, I have been engaged in a research project under the heading “Self-emancipation: Work, Organization and Resistance in the Global Workplace,” research which from 2010 until 2013 was facilitated by a Research Incentive Grant from Athabasca University. One aspect of this research focused on North America, resulting in several conference papers and a peer-reviewed article on the 1990s-era “Days of Action” in Ontario. Another aspect of this research focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, and resulted in several conference papers and a book contract on the 21st century emergence of Regional Integration Initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean. The third aspect of this research focused on the decomposition and recomposition of class relations in the territories formerly known as the Soviet Union. It was this third aspect of my research which was facilitated by the Academic and Professional Development Fund.
The research focuses on three moments or chapters in the history of an Arctic city in the Komi Republic (formerly part of the Soviet Union), a city known as Vorkuta. In the 1930s, Vorkuta was the site of the most extreme moments in the decomposition of the old working class – through first internment and then execution, by Stalin’s secret police, of the working class activists who had opposed the rise of Stalinism. Before their liquidation, these activists engaged in a very long, very arduous hunger strike, a strike which became the stuff of whispered legend in the following decades.
In the 1950s, Vorkuta again emerged to prominence. It had, in the 1940s and 1950s as part of the “gulag” system of camps in the Soviet Union, been transformed from a concentration/execution camp to a forced labour camp. The forced labourers worked primarily in several enormous coal mines, the coal from which becoming a crucial component in the energy supply of the Soviet Union. In 1953, after the death of Stalin, these forced labourers overcame many internal divisions, and launched a strike movement against conditions in the camps. Without question, this strike movement played a central role in the dismantling of the bulk of the forced labour camps in the years which followed.
In the 1980s, Vorkuta was still producing coal, but now employing “free” labour as opposed to forced labour. In 1989, 1990 and 1991, these coal miners engaged in mass strike actions. From these strikes, new trade unions emerged – trade unions independent of the Stalinist state. Without question, these strikes and the emergence of independent trade unionism, played a crucial role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Stalinism in 1991.
The study’s organizing framework is that provided by E.P. Thompson, who insisted that classes are not automatic products of the economy, but that in fact classes “make themselves” through struggle, debate and organization. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | In the 1930s, Vorkuta in Siberia emerged as one of the Soviet Union’s principle sources of coal. It was also the principal site of the final horror of Stalin’s extermination of the politicized workers who had raised the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. Before their extermination, the prisoners at Vorkuta, followers of Leon Trotsky, organized a magnificent hunger strike, which became the stuff of whispered legend in the years which followed.
By the 1950s Vorkuta was the principal supplier of coal to Leningrad – and the miners who dug that coal were almost all forced labourers. In 1953, several thousand of these forced labourers organized a massive strike against the slave labour system, serving in large measure as the final blow ending forced labour in the Soviet Union.
By the late 1980s, the mines of Vorkuta were operated by “free” wage labourers, and in 1989 a series of strikes by these miners – some of them the grandchildren of the 1930s Vorkuta workers –accelerated the collapse of “communism” and served as a buttress against the return of the old regime during the attempted coup in 1991.
The paper will suggest that a) the 1930’s era of strikes revealed clearly the class nature of the Soviet Union; b) the 1950’s era of strikes were shaped by and helped to end the moment of “primary accumulation” in the Soviet Union; and c) the 1980’s and early 1990’s era strikes were harbingers of the 21st century Russian working class, emergent in an era of neoliberalism. | en |
