Freedom of prices and the price of freedom: The miners' dilemmas in the Soviet Union and its successor states

Abstract

The coal‐miners' movement played a signficant role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the evolution of state policy towards the mining industries of post‐Soviet Russia and Ukraine. The movement was animated by the historically unique condition of the mining industry as a ‘planned loss’ sector. Gorbachev presented fresh opportunities for revising this condition, and the rhetoric of marketization and privatization was construed by miners as providing for more social justice than the system of bureaucratic tutelage under which they laboured. After 1991, miners in both Russia and Ukraine were confronted by the ‘fruits’ of their victory: increased dependence on mine directors, consuming enterprises that would not or could not pay their bills, and revenue‐starved governments that sought to curb inflation by withholding wages and closing the more unprofitable mines. The spectre of a ‘Thatcherite solution’ to this situation of stalemate hangs over the miners and their movement.