ABSTRACT
After decades of political control and suppression under Soviet communism, Russian labour burst onto the political scene with the massive and much-publicised miners’ strikes of 1989 and 1991. More than 400,000 workers participated in these strikes, which engulfed major coal basins, produced independent miners’ unions, and contributed to the Soviet collapse and the emergence of Boris Yeltsin. Some analysts anticipated the growth of a powerful workers’ movement in Russia, but in retrospect the miners’ strikes represented the height, rather than the beginning, of labour’s mobilisation and influence. The post-communist transition brought expanded organisational and political rights, and trade unions are still the largest civil society organisations in Russia. However, Russia’s workers remained largely quiescent throughout the deep economic downturn of the 1990s, as well as in the years of recovery and rapid growth from 2000 to 2008. Unions made forays into electoral politics but never had much impact, and the main surviving labour federation eventually subordinated itself to Putin’s “party of power”, United Russia. Still, modest new strike and protest movements have emerged since 2006, and contemporary scholars anticipate various futures for Russian labour.
