Part 1 Vorkuta: Anvil of the Working Class

Anvil—A heavy block on which metal can be hammered and shaped, typically of iron or (now) steel, having a flat top, concave sides, and (typically) a pointed or tapering projection at one end … in figurative contexts, esp. with reference to the use of an anvil as a block on which something is forged or shaped. (Oxford English Dictionary)

The Arctic settlement of Vorkuta was in every respect an anvil, a block on which was forged the emergent postrevolutionary working class. Letting fall into the background for a moment the received wisdom and theories about communism and the Russian Revolution and instead bringing to the fore issues of class formation and class struggle can assist mightily in understanding revolution and counter-revolution in the territories of the former Russian empire. In the chapters of part 1, I develop this class formation through an examination of three pivotal moments of class struggle in and around Vorkuta.

Chapter 1 examines Vorkuta in the 1930s, when the town was fast becoming one of the Soviet Union’s most important sources of coal. In the years from 1936 to 1938, Vorkuta also became the final resting place of Stalin’s political opponents—the same radicalized workers who had raised the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. Before their extermination, the political prisoners at Vorkuta—many being followers of Leon Trotsky, who had formerly constituted the Left Opposition within the Communist Party—organized a mass hunger strike, which became the stuff of whispered legend in the following decades.

In chapter 2, we move to the 1950s, by which point, as was indicated earlier, the forced labour camps at Vorkuta had seen “approximately half a million prisoners pass through their gates.” Vorkuta had grown to become a major mining centre and the principal supplier of coal to Leningrad, a city of well over three million people. In 1953, in the period following Stalin’s death, thousands of Vorkuta’s forced labourers organized a massive strike in protest against the Gulag labour system, demanding improvements to their living and working conditions. The strike, which ended in violent repression, nonetheless played a pivotal role in ending the forced labour system in the Soviet Union.

Chapter 3 focuses on the late 1980s and an even more massive strike. By then, the mines of Vorkuta were employing “free” wage labourers, some of them the grandchildren of those imprisoned at Vorkuta during the 1930s. In July 1989, the thousands labouring in Vorkuta’s coal pits were central to the wave of strikes that were instrumental in the collapse of the Soviet Union. From its origins as a graveyard for revolutionaries, then, Vorkuta gave birth to the gravediggers, first, of the forced labour system and, eventually, of the Stalinist state system itself.