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This research investigates the role which environmental and labor activism played in shaping dissent during the coal miners’ strikes in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Originating from wage cuts and difficult working conditions and developing into political concerns, the miners’ strikes highlight the relationship between environmental protection, labor rights, and self-determination. This paper expands the definition of “dissent” in the Soviet context by exploring how non-intelligentsia members participated in activism. While issues of industrial pollution, radiation, and irrigation were approached by dissident intelligentsia circles, different and less studied sites of labor, environmental, and political activism also emerged. The coal miners’ strikes of 1989, 1993, and 1996 offer a rich opportunity to expand our knowledge of labor and environmental activism in Ukraine in the 1980s and 1990s, thereby deepening our contextual understanding of factors which shaped the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first years of independent Ukraine.
