The coal miners’ strikes of 1989 and 1991 in the ussr have received significant attention from scholars in the country and abroad that peaked in the 1990s. Drawing on the existing scholarship, I argue that our understanding of the strikes remains incomplete unless we consider these events in their proper discursive contexts, which were different for the two waves of strikes. I explore the All-Union daily, Izvestiia, and weekly, Literaturnaia Gazeta, as well as a Belorussian daily, Sovetskaia Belorussiia, in order to restore the discursive contexts and apply them as a tool to explain the miners’ contradictory demands. From this contextualization, the wave of 1989 strikes emerges as a proto-class struggle played out within the peculiar sociopolitical conditions of Soviet society; while the strikes of 1991 appear as a result of the classical merging of the workers’ movement with that of intellectuals and politicians, who at that time aligned themselves with neoliberal ideals.

苏联在1989年和1991年发生的煤矿工人罢工受到了国内外学者的高度重视，而这一现象在1990年代达到顶峰。依靠现有的奖学金，我认为除非我们在适当的话语环境下考虑这些事件，否则我们对罢工的理解仍然是不完整的，这在两次罢工浪潮中是不同的。我每天浏览全联盟（Izvestiia），每周浏览文学（Literaturnaia Gazeta），以及白俄罗斯日报（Sovetskaia Belorussiia），以便恢复讨论环境，并将其作为解释矿工矛盾需求的工具。在这种背景下，1989年罢工浪潮在苏联社会特殊的社会政治条件下进行了一场原始阶级的斗争。1991年的罢工是工人运动与知识分子和政客的经典结合的结果，当时知识分子和政客与新自由主义的理想保持一致。