Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival & Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989-1992 (Suny Series in Oral and Public History) [Paperback]

Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Author), Daniel J. Walkowitz (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1995 | Series: Suny Series in Oral and Public History

In July 1989 coal miners throughout the Soviet Union engaged in a massive strike that briefly captured world headlines and inaugurated a movement of strike committees that persisted across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide. In this collection of interviews and essays based on encounters over a three-year period, the voices of industrial workers and their families in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, the coal capital of the Donbass, are heard. The stories collected here allow Western readers to "hear" these people describe their struggles for survival and identity in conditions of economic, political and social disintegration/transformation; and to analyze their testimonies and other kinds of texts in terms of changing meanings of work, gender, and national identity. Included are an examination of the "older generation" that came of age during the Stalin era; an analysis of the miners' movement and the trade union politics that emerged out of the strike of 1989; and a focus on the social crises and cultural disorientations accompanying Ukrainian independence.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lewis H. Sigelbaum is Professor of History at Michigan State University. He has written and co-edited six books on Russian and Soviet labor history. Daniel J. Walkowitz is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-1884, and The Mystification of the Middle Class: Gender and Social Identity among Social Workers, 1900-1980. He has also produced several video documentaries including "Perestroika from Below".

Product Details

• Paperback: 254 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (July 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791424863
• ISBN-13: 978-0791424865
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,015,032 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Daniel J. Walkowitz is an social and cultural historian who specializes in labor and urban history. A professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and of History at New York University, he is the author and editor of nearly a dozen books, notably, Working With Class (North Carolina, 1999) and Worker City, Company Town (Illinois, 1978), and he has produced film versions of several of them for public television. He is presently at work on a documentary based on his latest book, City Folk, (NYU Press, 2010), which he is co-producing with folklorists from the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and which they hope will appear in 2011. A folk dancer himself for nearly half a century, his recent work combines participant observation with video oral histories and archival research.

Daniel lives in New York with his wife, Judith, who is also a historian and their two Maine Coon cats, Josephine and Bellamy. They have a daughter Rebecca who teaches at Rutgers and a granddaughter, Lucy.