Kuzbass (Kuznetsk Basin)

Discovery and early development

The coal of the Kuznetsk Basin was first documented in 1721. In April of that year the naturalist Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt recorded coal in his diary, and in September the ore prospector Mikhailo Volkov reported coal from a burning hill on the upper Tom River. Which of the two counts as the discoverer remains disputed, and an obelisk to Volkov's find stands on the right bank of the Tom at Kemerovo. In 1842 the geologist Pyotr Chikhachev assessed the basin's reserves and introduced the term "Kuznetsk coal basin." From 1915 to 1920 the privately financed Kuznetsk Mines company (Kopikuz) worked in the region.

The USSR's energy base

From the mid-1920s the Kuzbass was developed as an energy base of the USSR. Over 1928-1940, during the First Five-Year Plan and after, coal output in the basin rose roughly ninefold and coking coal output nearly twenty-fivefold. In April 1932 the Kuznetsk metallurgical combine produced its first pig iron, and the Ural-Kuznetsk Combine became an industrial axis exchanging Urals iron ore for Kuzbass coking coal. This growth relied heavily on forced labor. From the 1930s special settlers and Siblag camp inmates were assigned to mines including Aralichevsky, Prokopyevsky and Kiselyovsky; by early 1939 some 52,000 prisoners were employed in Kuzbass coal mining. They lived in hastily built barracks and dugouts, exposed to high rates of disease and death.

War and postwar

During the Second World War the Kuzbass became the key fuel base sustaining the war economy in place of the occupied Donbass. It completed its annual extraction target early, on 1 December 1941, with output reaching 25.1 million tonnes that year. Between 1948 and 1988, 108 Kuzbass miners received the title Hero of Socialist Labor.

The 1989 miners' strike

On 10 July 1989 miners at Mezhdurechensk refused to go down the shafts, beginning the largest strike in Soviet history. It spread across the mines of the Kuzbass and on to the Karaganda basin in Kazakhstan and the Donbass. Living conditions were the starting point: miners were housed several families to a room in barracks built in the 1930s and could not even obtain soap. Their demands widened to pay, housing, a cleaner environment and greater political power, and strike committees formed in each area. After the government accepted the demands, Kuzbass miners returned to work on 22-23 July.

Today

The Kuzbass remains the center of Russia's coal industry. It accounts for about 60 percent of Russian coal output and about 80 percent of its coking coal. At the same time, environmental damage and public health problems have accumulated; over 1990-2018 life expectancy in the Kuzbass was about three years below the Russian average. Its inland location, far from consumers, has been a long-standing structural constraint.