Strike committee (zabastovochny komitet)

Formation

The strikes that began in the Kuznetsk Basin in July 1989 were the first large-scale strikes in Soviet history to be conducted legally. After miners in Mezhdurechensk stopped work, workers took to the streets and squares of their cities, and order was maintained by the strikers themselves. Strike committees formed in this process, and new worker leaders came forward as candidates for them. In the Kuzbass an oblast-level strike committee was formed and began work by the fifth day of the strike. Miners patrolled city districts together with the police.

Organization and functions

Strike committees were elected by open vote at rallies. They were charged with pressing the miners' demands in negotiations with the country's leadership, organizing workers' druzhiny to keep order in the squares, and picketing mines to prevent coal from being shipped without the committee's permission. Crime in the strike regions fell three to four times, and workers closed down liquor stores. Under pressure from the strikers, the committees passed votes of no confidence in the mine trade-union committees and councils of labour collectives. At the same time they clashed with mine administrations, which threatened to dismiss movement activists.

Very few party and economic managers sat on the strike committees. The committees maintained discipline and order during the strikes, showed a tendency to organize within a region, and took on monitoring implementation of the miners' demands. Weaknesses remained: the committees did not communicate with one another and tended to come under the influence of one or another local authority.

Dual power and politicization

In Karaganda the strike committee took over the mine and turned it into a self-managing enterprise. In Kemerovo and Karaganda the strike committees formed a centre of alternative power, and dual power existed. In late July, strike committee representatives negotiated with the Soviet state leadership for the first time, and Gorbachev and Ryzhkov signed a protocol of agreement with the miners. In Vorkuta the demands drawn up by the inter-mine strike committee were read out at a rally of many thousands on 21 July. Those demands included political items such as abolishing the constitutional article on the party's leading role and introducing direct secret elections of leaders.

Aftermath and significance

After the strikes ended, the strike committees continued as workers' committees (rabkomy). In February 1990 workers' committees met government officials again to check implementation of the protocols and draw up new ones. In August 1989 a regional union of strike committees was founded at Horlivka, electing a coordinating council and declaring itself an independent public organization to monitor implementation of the miners' demands. In the autumn of 1989 the Union of Kuzbass Workers was created and published its own newspaper. Miners called for independent trade unions, and the Independent Union of Miners was founded in July 1990.

The strike committee was an organ through which workers elected their own representatives, negotiated on equal terms with the country's leadership, and monitored implementation of agreements. This organizational form became the starting point for the workers' committee and independent trade union movements that followed, and the 1989 strikes themselves are counted among the factors that accelerated the economic and political transformation of 1991.