Empire, Democracy and Class: The Miners of Vorkuta and the Collapse of Russian Communism

Beginning in 1989, Vorkuta has emerged into the consciousness of observers in the West because of the actions of its mine workers. The thousands of miners in Vorkuta’s coal pits (the largest of which, Vorgashorskaya, is capable of producing 18,000 tons of coal a day); “launched the wave of strikes in 1989 that heralded the collapse of the Soviet Union.” These 1989-1993 actions are part of a 60-year tradition of direct, workers’ action in and around Vorkuta, a tradition that has largely been hidden from history. The town’s original purpose from 1933 to 1938 was first to imprison and then massacre thousands of Marxists who opposed the rise to power of Stalin and his bureaucracy. In impossible conditions, these anti-Stalinist Marxists fought the regime with words (resorting to “verbal newspapers” when all else was denied them8) and deeds -- launching a mass hunger strike, the first act in a long tradition of collective action against repression in Vorkuta. These Marxist workers were almost to a person executed. After hosting the first wave of resistance, Vorkuta was the site of the massacre of the Marxist opponents of Stalin. Vorkuta’s coal fields, for another 20 years, fuelled the industrial expansion of Stalin’s Russia -- through the sweat of tens of thousands of slave labourers. The rebellion of those slaves after Stalin’s death, marked the second wave of anti-Stalinist opposition, and sounded the death-knell for the slave labour system in Russia. And from 1989 to the present, the “wage slaves” of modern-day Vorkuta have been the most militant section of a revived independent workers’ movement in Russia, a workers’ movement central to the third great wave of anti-Stalinist opposition, a wave that this time succeeded in sweeping Stalinism from the stage of history. From being a graveyard of revolutionaries, then, Vorkuta became the birthplace of the grave-diggers of Stalinism. This paper will tell Vorkuta’s story.