ANALYSIS: The most dangerous workplace in the world: Ukraine's coal mines (10/27/02)

ANALYSIS

The most dangerous workplace in the world: Ukraine's coal mines

by David Marples

The coal mines of the Ukrainian Donbas have a lamentable reputation as the most dangerous of all workplaces in the modern world. Since Ukraine became independent in 1991, almost 4,000 miners have died in accidents, many as a result of the hazards of mining coal at depths of more than one kilometer and poor safety records at the mines.

Last month my visit to Donetsk coincided with the "Day of the Miner," August 25. Placards and window boxes displayed photographs of leading government officials, "hero miners," pole-vaulter Serhii Bubka, and the local soccer team Shakhtar Donetsk, proud winners of the Ukrainian championship last year. While children paraded by with banners from the various local regions, a loudspeaker played popular songs from the Soviet past.

Donetsk forms the center of a vast coalfield that extends into the Rostov region of Russia. In honor of its founder, Welsh entrepreneur John Hughes, the city was known as Yuzovka until 1924. Then it became Stalino, after the new Soviet leader, and only in 1961, after Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin, did it acquire its present appellation. Its main street is called Artem, after a professional revolutionary, Fedor Andreyevich Artem (1883-1921) though Artem was actually born in the Kursk region and only in 1917 did he become linked to Donetsk as the chairman of the Bolshevik party organization.

The region has a proud tradition. Some 13 years ago it was the center of the coal miners' strike, the first successful workers' strike in Soviet history. It was followed by the creation of an independent trade union, regarded at the time as a potential Solidarity: the Regional Union of Strike Committees of the Donbas, located in the town of Horlivka, north of Donetsk.

Seeking information about that union, I traveled to Horlivka with a Ukrainian friend. It could be reached from Donetsk by means of a dilapidated mini-bus and at a price of 3 hrv for a journey of some 80 kilometers. Next to me on the back seat was an old woman with five grocery bags. It was stiflingly, breathlessly hot and the van bounced us around like stones in a teapot. It broke down about halfway to our destination, but the driver nonchalantly tinkered with the engine and it sputtered back to life.

Two statues greet visitors to Horlivka. One is of the founder, Pyotr Gorlov (born 1839), a talented mining geologist born in Irkutsk, who explored and planned many of the mines of the Donbas region. The second is of a local hero, Nikolay Izotov, an initiator of record-breaking labor in the region in the early 1930s. Allegedly he was armed only with a pick and his "superhuman" efforts helped to pioneer the Stakhanov movement of that decade.

Horlivka consists of a series of bleak, ramshackle tenement houses and wide streets. They were practically devoid of traffic. The town resembles a forgotten and neglected wasteland. Reminiscent of Soviet times, its population walks with heads bowed, unwilling to offer conversation. At the only new building in the town, we spoke with Eduard Kashtanovsky, editor of the miners' newspaper Kochegarka, who monitored the 1991 strike and its results.

He informed us that most of the mines at Horlivka had now closed down. Wages have dropped dramatically in real terms since 1989, and often miners are not paid at all. What happened to the Regional Union, I asked? "Nothing," he responded. The leaders had been "bought off" with promises of apartments and cars, and the union disintegrated. Above all, the miners no longer had bargaining power since they represented an industry in deep decline.

Today the mines are in a deplorable state, but the miners have nowhere else to go. There are no retraining programs, and there is no logical alternative employment. The Kyiv government of President Leonid Kuchma is regarded with the same sort of contempt reserved for Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, but the miners lack the organization and fervor of that period.

Given the current catastrophic casualty rates in the Donbas mines, early closure would seem a worthwhile economic sacrifice. One senses, however, the local sentiment that such an action would betray the industrial past and defy the myth of the hero miner. Thus, the tradition of Stakhanov lives on in this forlorn region, celebrated annually with parades, speeches and, most notably, mass consumption of beer around the statue of Lenin in the center of Donetsk.

David R. Marples is professor of history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and director of the Stasiuk Program for the Study of Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, which is based at that university.

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