Miners in the margins

Miners in Donbass, 1990

I recently finished reading Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989-1992. This is a work of modern ethnography by Lewis Siegelbaum and Daniel Walkowitz. Although I take some issue with its postmodernist and constructivist methods and analytical biases, it is an incredibly valuable work, and its value has been amplified by recent events in the region.

The volume is structured around the events of the Donbass miners’ strikes of 1989, which were considered to be one of the factors setting in motion the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no doubt that a considerable force of impetus for this study was precisely this anti-Soviet angle. The idea was to showcase a significant social force which opposed Moscow’s dominance in the name of an alternative vision of social justice. The Donbass miners’ unions are thus explicitly placed in the same light as the Solidarność trade-unionist protests in Poland.

But Workers of the Donbass Speak also stands as an open refutation and rebuke to the narrow nationalist ideologues of the western part of Ukraine. By extension, it serves as an open refutation and rebuke to the Western corporate media who uncritically parrot Ukrainian nationalist ideology in service to the Ukrainian cause against Russia. The book shows definitively, from the primary source, that the political situation in the Donbass was not, contrary to Western media narratives, fabricated whole-cloth by Russian propagandists in 2014 in reaction to the Euromaidan.

The people of Donbass, and in particular the miners, struggled against the dominance of the centralising metropole of Soviet Moscow—and at that time were hailed in the West, at least among those who knew of them, as noble truth-tellers and selfless heroes. This volume demonstrates, in their own words, how the very same people broadly continued to struggle against the dominance of the centralising metropole of nationalist Kiev. Even in the early 1990s, they had no desire to serve as the ‘useful idiots’ in building a Ukrainian identity that would split them away definitively from their families and friends in Rostov, Krasnodar or elsewhere. In the end, for their pains, they ended up reviled by the same West in 2014 as terrorists, victims of Russian brainwashing or ‘little green men’.

The volume has some decided weaknesses. The postmodernist blathering of the principal ethnologists in particular is a rather sad feature of the general academic trend of the early 1990s. It showcases, rather than any independent merit of the field, the pitiable overall servility of the anthropological discipline in the West to the ilk of Foucault and Derrida. Ironically, despite the authors’ stated interest in ‘foregrounding dialogue rather than monologue’, we must endure two incredibly tedious and tiresome authorial explanatory essays in the middle of these interviews.

The interviews themselves, however, are very much worth these occasional scholarly irruptions. And Siegelbaum and Walkowitz are deeply to be lauded and thanked for having conducted them in the first place. The miners and their families in the Kuibyshev raion are allowed to speak for themselves without filters. The diversity of their views shows quite readily how they are not monolithic, but still certain common themes appear.

Women colliery workers in Donbass, 1943

For example: there is, at least among the older generations interviewed here, a considerable (but by no means unanimous) soft spot for Stalin, on account of the fact that he won World War II and also managed to keep food prices low after the war was over. At least two of the miners interviewed here, Ivan Kushch and Viktor Ignatov, couched their praise of Stalin in such terms. Several of the older generation also worried, as the Soviet Union disappeared, about the morals and habits of the youth: drugs and loud music in particular.

The people who were young-adults in 1989 had a much more troubled relationship with communism. While still professing many of the ideals and tenets of the Soviet state, they felt a keen sense of betrayal and disillusionment in the entire system. The same ideological and political apparatus that had held up the Donbass miners (beginning with Stakhanov) as essentially worker-saints and paragons of Soviet manhood (and also heavily subsidised their salaries), also unfortunately neglected to maintain the working conditions, expand the living conditions (including housing for families), or upgrade and replace the mining machines that would have made continuing in their profession more tolerable. Face-workers in mines were very much a privileged class within the Soviet system. But that privilege came at a decided cost: one which shortened the average lifespan and decreased the quality of life of a person which engaged in it.

Thus, many of the striking workers began with discrete and achievable material demands—demands for things like soap. Only later did they begin to add in political demands for change and to see themselves as assisting ‘perestroika from below’. Even reading the first-hand accounts of the strikes in this collection, it is deeply unclear the degree to which the miners even desired the collapse of the system they were protesting. Many seem to have felt they were simply ridding the Communist Party and the Soviet Union more generally of its bad actors and corrupt, parasitical political figures. Others clearly began to feel that Soviet bureaucracy created and sustained such parasites by design.

What is striking is how much of a non-event the dissolution of the Soviet Union is, in the lives of the miners. Many of the same problems that they had faced in the final years of the Soviet Union, persisted or deepened into Ukrainian independence. It is immediately clear that a number of miners felt they had merely traded one despotic and domineering metropole (Moscow) for another ‘petty prince or tsar in Kiev’, only that the Kiev metropole did not feel any of the same need that the Soviet state did to fill its obligations to its workers. In the words of Yuri Makarov:

In the past we fought for the existence of Ukraine as an autonomous state, but… we wanted power to be given to the localities, enterprises, cities; we wanted the living standard of the population to improve, but not so that Kiev could concentrate the reins of government in its fist.

What is interesting is that Valery Samofalov—one of the leaders of the mine strikes who ended up championing some very strong liberal beliefs—characterised Donbass’s desires for autonomy in the language of Western federalism and republicanism. The Donbass representatives held up ‘such countries as Switzerland, the USA, Germany, and Austria’ as their models for what they wanted within the Ukrainian state. (I note with some irony that here in fact is the Russia that Sebastian Milbank and the Europhile post-liberals were looking for all along, and they did not recognise it.) Others—including high schoolers in 1992, like Marina Kushch—complain about the problems of forced usage of the Ukrainian language in schools, where the textbooks in math, science and geography are all in Russian.

After the Soviet Union dissolved, a small handful of the striking miners, such as the abovementioned Samofalov, went whole-hog into a fervent belief in by-your-bootstraps individualism, privatisation and entrepreneurialism—but clearly not everybody did. Samofalov is notable in that he is something of a vocal anomaly in the collection: a clear voice of conscientious and idealistic, howbeit rather selective and (in retrospect) naïve, market liberalism. Others were far less sanguine about the transition to a market economy… or at the very least had serious reservations.

Economic, bread-and-butter problems hover over the early interviews. The biggest problems for the miners are housing and working conditions. Political problems are present too—in particular, a kind of straitjacketed language that narrows the possibilities of political discourse. But the miners come to support a ‘perestroika from below’. The collapse of the Soviet Union isn’t sought for.

When the miners find themselves a part of Ukraine, the economic problems persist, but the responsibility for addressing them falls to the mines themselves. With the collapse of the state, the sites of production become also welfare offices and social centres—tasks that they’re not prepared to handle. And then come the threats of downsizing and layoffs, combined with rampant inflation, that come with price liberalisation. The Donbass people who are interviewed here are well aware of these problems, but do not know where the problems are coming from. Soviet bureaucrats and their culture? Corruption in the new government? The ‘mafia’ and its presence in ‘biznes’? In the prophetic words of trade union director Yuri Pivovarov, ‘We feel uneasy, as if we are in a train and do not know where it is headed.’

The problem of nationalism and national identity gets thrown very roughly into the mix, with Kravchuk and organisations like Rukh being singled out as sources of a monistic understanding of Ukrainian identity that (even at this early date) lashes out at Donbass people as ‘Russian separatists’ and ‘communists’, and clashes deeply with Donbass realities. Tatiana Samofalova (Valery’s wife) proudly calls herself Ukrainian, and takes pride in her ability to speak Ukrainian. But then she also says: ‘My relatives, my aunt, my cousin, live in Russia and it has become a problem now to go and see them. We cannot meet with each other very often, and letters don’t get delivered. Why would I want such independence?’

Workers at Gorky Mine, Donbass, 1932

There is an interesting connexion between Donbass and Pittsburgh—that isn’t just a shared history of coal mining and Russian immigration. Donetsk and Pittsburgh were, once upon a time, sister cities. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, many people in Donetsk looked to Pittsburgh and its post-Rust Belt transition as a hopeful potential model for how Donetsk could develop in a humane direction under conditions of capitalism. The principal ethnographers here express doubts about that, pointing to the shortcomings and unevenness of Pittsburgh’s post-Rust Belt development, especially in comparison to the mythology of the same.

And then, toward the end of the volume, we see an actual instance of socialist nostalgia. Valery Zadorozhnyi, an accountant at a local TV station, expresses a desire to restore the ‘basic level of social protection’ that it gave ‘to old people and cripples’, noting that ‘at least they got their piece of bread’. His prognosis for the future of his country (speaking of Ukraine) under capitalism is unsparingly bleak. He doesn’t see any positive values in capitalism that could take the place of this basic principle of fairness.

It is also interesting to see where the rebirth of a belief in God, and a rediscovery of Orthodox Christianity’s symbols and ethos, creeps in around the edges in the wake of the Soviet Union’s passing. Intriguingly, it’s the Kushches—the family headed by a still unapologetically-Stalinist patriarch, Ivan—that seem to most deeply and authentically embrace belief in God and in Christianity. ‘We weren’t taught to believe in God,’ says Nadezhda Kushch. ‘At present, we’re beginning to do it in our own way… we’re like blind kittens now. In old Russia there used to be the law of God and it was taught in school, but people of our generation didn’t have it.’

Throughout Workers in the Donbass Speak, despite the dizzying multiplicity of perspectives put on display, there is a common thread running throughout them. It is the desire to live like people, to have a normal life. Yuri Makarov describes the aim of the miners’ strikes as ‘to provide normal living and working conditions for workers’. Olga Samofalova (no relation to Valery) puts it, even after independence, they had ‘to fight to achieve a normal human life’. This view is echoed by practically every other person interviewed in the book—and though obviously they have different views on the means necessary to accomplish it, certain basic contours of what is understood by a ‘normal human life’ show themselves: a roof over a family’s heads; dignified and decent-paying jobs; social conditions such that kids aren’t regularly hurt or killed or addicted to drugs.

The tragedy is that Donbass never got that. The Ukrainian government deliberately, and cruelly, denied that basic normality of human life to them after 2014. In 2024, the people of Donbass still have to suffer—not merely neglect or mismanagement as under the Soviets, but shelling and air strikes from the ‘government’ that claims ‘sovereignty’ over their land.

Modern-day Moscow shouldn’t try to find reason to crow too loudly over this interview collection, though. Donbass people clearly did not react kindly to being made socialist icons, hero-workers, mascots of Soviet labour—while being denied basic necessities like housing and bar soap. There should be a cautionary dimension here toward a government like Putin’s, that would turn them into patriotic mascots now, or heroes of all-Russian unity, while not listening to their demands for a normal life. People in Donbass have had to suffer such deprivations at the hands of the Ukrainian military for eight entire years, while the Russian government sat aside and dithered.

Ultimately, the purpose of this volume holds up well even after over three decades. It is to simply let Donbass people speak in their own words. Sadly they are filtered here by translation, but the meaning of their aspirations comes through loud and clear anyway.