The Donbas Miners

On 11 July 1990 the unthinkable happened. Coal miners across the Soviet Union went on strike. The following morning a Top Secret CIA assessment landed on President Bush’s desk: ‘Tens of thousands of Soviet miners in the USSR’s four main coal-producing regions and other areas yesterday staged one-day strikes…The strikes demonstrated the miners’ open, growing hostility towards the Communist Party and central government…The significant number of reported sympathy strikes demonstrates broad public anger.’

It was just the beginning. Miners’ strikes acted as catalyst for broader social dissent ultimately playing a significant part in the demise of the Soviet Union.  By the end of the following year the Baltic States had declared unilateral independence, Moscow witnessed an abortive coup, and the Soviet Union was dissolved.

Donbas miners were especially militant.  Here they allied with Rukh, a Ukrainian nationalist movement. When Soviet miners mounted another major strike on 1 March 1991, Ukrainian miners joined in sympathy. Among other claims they demanded recognition of Ukraine’s Declaration of State Sovereignty. On 1 December a referendum was held across Ukraine.  83-84% of Donbas residents voted in favour of separating from Russia – a stunning vote by the Russian-speaking mining communities.  It has never been the case that the majority of Ukrainians in these regions ‘want to be Russian’.   The story is more complicated. This would also prove the last occasion when the Donbas was able to exercise a free vote on the matter without Russian meddling.

Independence did not bring stability or prosperity.  Unrest continued throughout the 1990s. Miners’ strikes, of course, were nothing new in the Donbas.  Major events  had occurred in 1923 and 1927-28.  The latter led to Stalin’s repression of the Donbas miners and deportations. Metropolitan-Vickers employees working in the region were initially spared arrest through Stalin’s personal intervention. However, in 1933, show trials were held; the British engineers were convicted, but later expelled from the Soviet Union. Over the period of Stalin’s 1937-38 repressions some 260,000 Ukrainians were arrested and 120,000 executed.  Russian brutality against Ukrainians is also an old story.

Russian coal mining industry in crisis

Today, Russia’s coal companies face mass bankruptcies.  The problems started following the invasion of Ukraine. Over the last three years they have mounted.  Sanctions, high interest rates, falling world prices amidst a global tariffs war, competition, and a parallel crisis in Russia’s rail industry, have conspired to bring this industry – once the showcase of heroic, Soviet endeavour – to the brink.  Since the end of January, JSC Russian Railways has reported that mining enterprises have entirely stopped transporting coal in western directions. In total, the Ministry of Energy estimates the industry has lost 2.1 trillion roubles since 2022 (for context, this is a sum bigger than Russia’s annual health budget).  This is only exceeded by GAZPROM – once Russia’s stellar company – that has posted around 4.3 trillion roubles in losses since the invasion of Ukraine.

Today, 27 coal enterprises accounting for 9% of production are in a pre-bankruptcy state. Another 62 enterprises, accounting for 29% of production are making above-industry average losses.  By the end of 2024, every coal mining enterprise in Russia had posted a loss.  Tens of thousands of jobs are in jeopardy.  The Kremlin understands the risks and has appointed VEB.RF, the state development corporation, to oversee the industry. Liquidations are possible.  VEB.RF, actually, has an awful record itself and is currently sanctioned and disconnected from SWIFT.  The competent Igor Shuvalov was appointed to head the organisation in 2018, but there is only so much you can do when your boss is spending 38% of the federal budget on a ‘special military operation’.

What are the Donbas miners fighting for?

On 19 February 2022, five days before the invasion of Ukraine, separatist authorities in Luhansk and Donetsk announced a general mobilisation. Thousands of Donbas miners received summons to mobilise in the separatist 1 and 2 Army Corps.  It was all treated as a bit of a joke.  The Russian ‘special military operation’ would be over in a couple of weeks and they would all return to work. How wrong.

Putin’s ‘liberation’ of the Donbas has resulted in an epic, historic catastrophe worse than the Nazi occupation.

By the end of 2022, 58% of the mining workforce had been mobilised. But the casualties kept mounting and the conscription age was raised to 65. This year, call-up notices have been sent to teenagers that have just completed 11th grade. Gerasimov’s bankrupt strategy of ‘meat attacks’ just keeps adding more meat to the gigantic funeral pyre. Tens of the thousands of militiamen have now been killed and maimed (one estimate suggests fatalities have passed the 100,000 mark).  The dying male population is evident in startling numbers: on the eve of the invasion, 17,900 job seekers were registered in the separatist areas. One year later there were just 376.  Forcible mobilisation has become extermination of Donbas Ukrainians.

The mobilised have been cynically exploited by the Russians. Second World War kit and rifles were bunged their way. Or they were told to buy their own kit. Recently, one of the poster boys of the so-called ‘Russian spring’ of 2014 was captured by Ukrainian forces. He was found unconscious and abandoned in a trench.  His body armour comprised rolled up sleeping mats and he had one water bottle and one can of meat.  The position where he was recovered was littered with the corpses of dozens of ‘expendables’, like him, in Moscow’s ‘liberation’ of the Donbas. He will languish for months as a POW because the Russian MOD prioritises the return of ethnic Russians over Donbas Ukrainians, despite Putin’s vacant claim that they are ‘one people’.

War weariness has turned into dejection and disillusion.  The Russians will not release mobilised militiamen.  The only way out is death, maiming or reaching the age of 65.  ‘Most of those with whom I mobilized are no longer alive,’ 55-year old militiaman Igor Dyda has observed, ‘I myself could have died three times already.’ Miners have been sending letters to Putin complaining that they are too old and infirm to fight – to no avail.  One consequence has been a rash of desertions: in Southern Military District, 58% of desertions are the militiamen (some have returned to discover their homes have been ‘nationalised’ – stolen – by local, gangster authorities).

Miners have not been paid.  Claimed wage arrears in Luhansk – dating back to 2014 – totalled 471 million roubles at the end of last year.  The Luhansk separatist authority is bankrupt; all it can do is plead with Moscow that duly ignores the pleas.  And when the miners return – the survivors of Putin’s grotesque folly – what will they come back to anyway?  The Russians have assessed 100 of Luhansk’s 114 mines are unprofitable.   A similar sentence has been passed in Donetsk.  Recently, two Russian companies that leased 15 working mines in occupied Luhansk and Donetsk – Impex-Don and the Don Coal Trading House – reported they were pulling out: the ventures are simply unprofitable. The mines will never re-open. In tandem, Alchevsk Metallurgical Plant (AMK) – Luhansk’s largest industrial enterprise – is on the brink of collapse. Its chemical industries were destroyed in the summer fighting of 2022. The maimed, the halt and the blind will be returning to unemployment in a depopulated wasteland.

The hell-hole of occupied Ukraine has recently been revealed in the testimonies of Russian wives who moved to the region to be closer to husbands: water can be off for two weeks; power for one week; apartments rent for as much as 50,000 roubles per month; food is expensive; bread costs 70-80 roubles; cigarettes cost 201 roubles; the internet is severely restricted and there is a curfew at 10pm.  The supposedly ‘liberated’ locals actually resent the appearance of these ‘outsider’ Russians.

The Kremlin dissimulates development of the occupied regions: in April the Mishushtin government announced that a sum of just over 500 million roubles was being allocated in 2024-25 for ‘housing reconstruction’ in the (occupied and devastated) DPR and Zaporizhzhia provinces.  That is around $6 million.

Moscow has laughably dangled the promise of minerals in Washington’s face, but this is just another cruel joke on the Donbas miners (the Bolsheviks made the same offer in 1919; both Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George were affronted and rejected the brazen bribe).  The people of south-east Ukraine have never been so terribly abused or the region so ravaged.  President Putin has out-matched both Stalin and the Nazis.  There is little to celebrate on Victory Day this year.

Cover photo: Viktor Mácha / viktormacha.com