Vorkuta: Three Chapters in the Making of a Working Class

• Main Author: Kellogg, Paul
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: Forced Labour; Gulag; Vorkuta; Soviet Union; Arctic
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2149/3419

Since 2010, I have been engaged in a research project under the heading “Self-emancipation: Work, Organization and Resistance in the Global Workplace,” research which from 2010 until 2013 was facilitated by a Research Incentive Grant from Athabasca University. One aspect of this research focused on North America, resulting in several conference papers and a peer-reviewed article on the 1990s-era “Days of Action” in Ontario. Another aspect of this research focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, and resulted in several conference papers and a book contract on the 21st century emergence of Regional Integration Initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean. The third aspect of this research focused on the decomposition and recomposition of class relations in the territories formerly known as the Soviet Union. It was this third aspect of my research which was facilitated by the Academic and Professional Development Fund. The research focuses on three moments or chapters in the history of an Arctic city in the Komi Republic (formerly part of the Soviet Union), a city known as Vorkuta. In the 1930s, Vorkuta was the site of the most extreme moments in the decomposition of the old working class – through first internment and then execution, by Stalin’s secret police, of the working class activists who had opposed the rise of Stalinism. Before their liquidation, these activists engaged in a very long, very arduous hunger strike, a strike which became the stuff of whispered legend in the following decades. In the 1950s, Vorkuta again emerged to prominence. It had, in the 1940s and 1950s as part of the “gulag” system of camps in the Soviet Union, been transformed from a concentration/execution camp to a forced labour camp. The forced labourers worked primarily in several enormous coal mines, the coal from which becoming a crucial component in the energy supply of the Soviet Union. In 1953, after the death of Stalin, these forced labourers overcame many internal divisions, and launched a strike movement against ...