On November 6, my hosts in Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), a democratic socialist organization in Ukraine, arranged for me to meet with Yuriy Samoilov, a co-founder of Sotsialnyi Rukh, President of the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine, and President of the Kryvyi Rih regional sector of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU).

Yurii was on his way back to his home in the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih. We met at the Kyiv office of the Rosa Luxemburg Siftung, the political education foundation of the Die Linke (The Left), a democratic socialist party in Germany.

Sergey Movchan of the Solidarity Collectives provided the translations for our conversation in Kyiv. (See my interview with Sergey Movchan in Dispatches from Europe #11. [1]) I also spent November 10 and 11 in Kryvyi Rih with Yurii and his comrades in Sotsialnyi Rukh, the miners union, the teachers union, and the veterans union, where Dionysiy Vynohradiv, an activist in the student trade union Priama Diia (Direct Action) and Sotsialynyi Rukh, translated our conversations. This report covers my discussions with Yurii in Kyiv and Kryvyi Rih.

Yurii Samoilov and Howie Hawkins in Kyiv, November 6, 2024.

Yurii Samoilov and Howie Hawkins in Kyiv, November 6, 2024.

 

 

Yurii, who is 68 now, was a miner in the Kyivii Rih iron ore mines for 35 years. He was a co-founder of the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine in 1989, which grew out of strike committees that had formed independently of government-controlled trade unions of the Soviet Union. The 1989-1991 Donbass miners’ strikes, the largest in the history of the Soviet Union, helped bring about the breakup of the Soviet Union. [2, 3]

Yurii was already a seasoned radical by the time of the 1989-1991 strike wave. He said he had been inspired by the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, when he wore long hair and called for “flowers, not arms” during the nuclear disarmament movement against the Euromissiles crisis of 1977 to 1987. He supported the New Left on both sides of the Cold War. For Yurii, the New Left meant a democratic socialist alternative to both the capitalism of the West and the bureaucratic one-party states of the East.

His dissident views got him expelled from Komsomol, the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, the political youth organization in the Soviet Union, for being a “Western hippie.” The man who expelled him was none other than Volodymyr Zelensky’s grandfather, who Yurii called a “brutal Stalinist.” Yurii said he had read more Marx and knew Marxist theory better than grandfather Zelensky and the other adult supervisors of his Komsomal chapter.

An important inspiration for Yurii in helping to organize the 1989-1991 Donbas miners strike wave and the Independent Trade Union of Miners of Ukraine was the Polish trade union Solidarnosc (Solidarity). Its full name was the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity,” which began as a new trade union independent of the state-controlled unions in 1980 in the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. It built itself quickly over the next year into a 10 million member union, representing one-third of the country’s working-age population, with a broad anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and workers rights agenda. It used strikes and other methods of civil resistance to advance workers’ rights and democratic change.

Poland’s one-party Communist state initially responded to Solidarnosc by imposing martial law and banning the union in 1981 in an unsuccesful attempt to suppress it. Solidarnosc remained active underground and by 1989 Solidarnosc had compelled Poland to hold its first multi-party elections since 1947. Out of the parliamentary elections in June 1989, a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed. In the December 1990 presidential election, the President of Solidarnosc, Lech Wałęsa, was elected President of Poland.

Once in power, Solidarnosc, took a sharp turn to the neoliberal right. It followed the instant privatization, marketization, deregulation, and austerity program promoted by the American neoliberal shock therapist Jeffrey Sachs with the support of longtime Polish leftist dissidents like the new Minister of Labor, Jacek Kuron, a decision Kuron would live to bitterly regret. How this right turn unfolded is told from the inside by Tadeusz Kowalik, a leading Polish economist who had been a Rosa Luxemburg-inspired democratic socialist dissident since the 1950s against the authoritarian one-party state and top-down command economy and then against Solidanarsc’s turn to neoliberalism in the 1990s. [4] The result by 1993 was a 30% decrease in industrial production and a rise in unemployment from virtually zero under under the planned economy to 25%, making Poland one of the most unequal countries in the world. [5]

Yurii said the miners union had about 52,000 members in the Donbas region before Russia’s first invasion in 2014. The Russians have crushed the union in the Russian-occupied areas with brutal repression that has killed eight union activists. Coal mining employed the largest share of miners in the Donbas. Most of the underground mines now in Russian-occupied territory have been closed down and many of them have been flooded. Open pit mines in Russian-occupied areas of the Donbas have proliferated. The flooded underground coal mines as well as the open pit mines release highly acidic water that contains heavy metals, including arsenic, copper, and lead. This poisoned water contaminates lakes, rivers, streams, and aquifers, and harm humans, animals, and plants. This environmental catastrophe my render up to two-thirds of Russian-occupied Donbas uninhabitable for generations. [6, 7]

Today the miners union is down to about 2,400 members, concentrated in the iron ore mines around Kryvyi Rih. About 70% of the members are now in the Ukrainian armed forces fighting the Russian invasion. Many miners volunteered and most other males miner under 60 was conscripted. Women are now half of the iron ore miners.

Yurii emphasized how central women are to the miners union. He said women were the driving force in the 2020 strike against the Kryvyi Rih Iron Ore Plant. [8] The mine is the largest in Ukraine and owned by two of Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs, Rinat Akhmetov and Ihor Kolomoisky. The workers struck for living wages, earlier retirement, and new management. The women were central organizers and militant, including attempting to occupy the offices of the mine’s president. Several women were put on trial for that action, but were acquitted in court. The company continues to investigate them.

Yurii turned to describing Ukrainian politics. He noted that members of the Zelensky family were his neighbors in Kryvyi Rih. He knew the family from before when President Volodomyr Zelensky was born. If Volodymyr’s grandfather was a “brutal Stalinist,” he said Zelensky’s father was a plain Soviet Marxist-Leninist. Yurii said Volodomyr was always political, with Western capitalist views like Joe Biden, but his presidential campaign was like Donald Trump’s first campaign — it was a business project to improve his brand that unexpectedly succeeded.

Kryvyi Rih had pro-Russian leaning politics before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. It is the center of one the two mineral basins, the Kryvbas and the Donbas, with the Krybas centered around iron ore and the Donbas further east centered around coal. They were the mineral and energy foundation for the metallurgical industry that had drawn in many Russians and other nationalities from the Czarist and Soviet empires since the late 19th century. Russia become the common language in the mining and industrial urban areas, while the farming villages in the rural areas remained Ukrainian speaking.

A prominent political family in Kryvi Rih is the Vilkuls, who are seen as proxies for the oligarch Rinat Akhemetov and wealthy in their own right from real estate and construction businesses and allegedly from corruption using their government offices. Yurii Vilkul has been the mayor of Kryvyi Rih for most of the years since 2010 as a member of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukoych’s Party of Regions and its successor Opposition Bloc. Since 2020 in a post-Maidan rebranding, he has run on his own party line, the Vilkul Bloc – Ukrainian Perspective. After the Euromaidan revolution, there were large street protests against his alleged vote-rigging in his 2015 re-election.

Yurii Vilkul’s son, Oleksandr Vilkul, has had an even more prominent political profile. He was a member of the national parliament from 2006-2010 and 2014-2019. Victor Yanukovych appointed him as Governor of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, in which Kryvyi Rih is located, from 2010 to 2012 and then Deputy Prime Minister from 2012 to 2014. After the Revolution of Dignity pushed Yanukovych from power, Olexander Vikul remained in the parliament and was the Opposition Bloc’s candidate for president in 2019, coming in eighth out of 39 candidates in the first round with 4.15% of the vote. Though he was first on the Opposition Bloc’s party list for a seat in the parliament, the party only gained 3.23% of the vote, falling below the 5% threshold for proportional representation. In 2020, he ran for mayor of Kyrvi Riy, hoping to replace his father, but came in third in the first round with 12.95% of the vote. His father, the former mayor who stayed on the city council, became mayor again after the winner of the 2019 election died in 2021. Three days after the full-scale Russian invasion began, Oleksandr was appointed the Head of the Military Administration of Kryvyi Rih by his father.

A month later, a Oleh Tsarev, a former fellow member of parliament with Oleksandr in the Party of Regions who was now an official in the separatist Donbas “People’s Republics,” called Oleksandr urging him the surrender Kryvyi Rih and become a big player in the new Russian-controlled government. Oleksander famously replied on Facebook: “”Fuck you, traitor, along with your masters!” [9]

Yurii Somoilov said the Vilkuls’ transition from Russia-friendly politicians tied to eastern Ukrainian oligarchs with business interests more aligned with Russian than Western business interests reflected the change in public opinion in Kryvyi Rih, which began moving away from its alignment with the pro-Russian Party of Regions and then Opposition Bloc, first with Russia’s intervention in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 and then decisively following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The Russian-speaking majority of Kryvih Rih that had been skeptical or opposed to the Revolution of Dignity were now united against Russia’s aggression.

Yurii still doesn’t trust the Vilkuls. They are too close to the oligarchs who own the iron ore mines. He didn’t like that Oleksandr received emissaries from the fascist Right Sector after he cussed out the traitor Oleh Tsarev. He didn’t like the lack of respect military administrators and commanders like Oleksandr Vilkul for the self-organization of the public and the rank-and-file soldiers to defend Kryvyi Rih and Ukraine as a whole. He said it was the self-organized resistance of the people and rank-and-file soldiers, not elites like the Vilkuls, who stopped the Russian army and began to reclaim land from it in 2022. He said the resistance to the Russian invasion was a working class people’s army. With evident pride, he showed me a video on his phone of his son driving a military truck as part of the recent Ukrainian incursion into the Russian oblast of Kursk.

Yurrii said a class analysis of the war tells us that the only solution to the war is the death, or at least the fear, of both the Ukrainian and Russian elites of a workers revolution. He noted that there are 5 million weapons among the regular people of Ukraine, which is dangerous for the Ukrainian authorities as well and Russia’s rulers because a Ukrainian example could spread to Russia. He said the police union in Kryvyi Rih, unlike policy unions in the U.S., is progressive and would not repress a workers’ movement. Sooner or later, the working class will rise up not only to help Armed Force of Ukraine to defeat the Russian invaders but also to defeat the capitalist oligarchs of Ukraine. 90% of Ukraines soldiers want a ceasefire, he said, not because they accept Russian occupation but because they are exhausted and distrustful of Ukraine’s oligarchs and top military commanders, who have failed to treat frontline soldiers with sufficient respect, failed to provide fixed terms of service, and imposed an unequal burden of fighting on the working class. He said, in a seeming reference to the Holodomor, the mass famine that Stalin imposed on Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of people, “the working people have two options, eat their own children or eat the bosses.” It is “those with nothing to lose,” he said, “who are willing to risk revolution.”

Turning to how to organize for a revolution, he talked about what Sotsialnyi Rukh is doing. He said that the national character of Ukraine is anti-authoritarian, but there also needs to be an organized movement to develop a popular vision and win people over to it. He said the Sotsialnyi Rukh, of which he is one of the founders, is building a party of the Ukrainian Left. His daughter, Snizhana Oleksun, a school teacher, was elected as the chair of Sotslianiy Rukh at their September 2024 conference. The organization is still relatively small, with about 100 members now, but it is well-integrated with and respected in trade unions and feminist, LGBT, environmental, and student movements.

Yurii emphasized that international solidarity is crucial for Sotsialnyi Rukh. Given the colonial, exploitative, and repressive legacy of Soviet Communism in Ukraine, Yurii said that “setting up a Left party would be suicidal in Ukraine without international support.” The state, under its decommunization laws, can go after democratic socialists of the New Left as well as the Stalinist Communists of the Old Left. It is hard to win public support for a democratic Left in Ukraine when the international Left appears to be supporting, or at least at least making excuses for, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Yurii said the Sotsialnyi Rukh is asking the international Left to support more arms for Ukraine and more sanctions on Russia, as are people across the Ukrainian political spectrum. What the Ukrainian Left is also asking for is cancellation of Ukraine’s unjust foreign debts [10] and for support for their demands against the neoliberal labor, land, deregulation, privatization, austerity, and regressive taxation policies of the Ukrainian government. [11] The Left-Green Alliance of Denmark is providing financial support for Sotsialnyi Rukh as an allied ecosocialist party through its government-funded party foundation. [12]

Yurii also said material aid from the international Left to the Ukrainian Left is good not only for the benefits that the materials supplied will do but also for the Ukrainian Left because “it shows the Ukrainian public that the international Left is with the people, not Putin.” He cited the example Workers Aid to Ukraine in the U.S. raising money funds for the Independent Miners Union to buy water purification systems for people in Kryvyi Rih, who have suffered water shortages since Russia blew up the Kakhovka dam in June 2023. [13] Since I met with Yurii Samoilov, the Ukraine Solidarity Network has organized a campaign to raise funds to give to the independent miners and railway workers unions for the purchase of generators for power and heat for needy disabled and 3-child families suffering this winter without power due to Russia’s bombardment and destruction of Ukrainian power plants and power distribution infrastructure. [14]

I will have more to report about Yurii Somoilov and his comrades when I report on my meetings a few days later with the Kryvyi Rih chapter of Sotsialnyi Rukh.

Notes

1. Howie Hawkins, “Dispatches from Europe #11: Socialists and Anarchists in Ukraine,” November 15, 2024, https://newgreenhorizons.us/howie-hawkins-dispatches-from-europe-11/.

2. “1990s Donbas miners’ strikes,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Donbas_miners’_strikes.

3. Theodore Friedgut and Lewis Siegelbaum, “Perestroika from Below: The Soviet Miners’ Strike and its Aftermath,” New Left Review, May-June 1990, https://newleftreview.org/issues/i181/articles/theodore-friedgut-lewis-siegelbaum-perestroika-from-below-the-soviet-miners-strike-and-its-aftermath.pdf.

4. Tadeusz Kowalik, From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland (Monthly Review Press, 2012).

5. Japhy Wilson, Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid (Verso, 2014), p. 26.

6. Oleksii Vasyliuk, “Unregulated coal mining destroys Donbas nature,” Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group, April 23, 2024, https://uwecworkgroup.info/unregulated-coal-mining-destroys-donbas-nature/.

7. Stanislav Storozhenko, “How Russia’s full-scale invasion has accelerated the flooding of Donbas coal mines,” New Eastern Europe, November 21, 2024, https://neweasterneurope.eu/2024/11/21/how-russias-full-scale-invasion-has-accelerated-the-flooding-of-donbas-coal-mines/.

8. Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (UK), “Victory to the Ukrainian miners,” September 14, 2020, https://ukrainesolidaritycampaign.org/2020/09/14/victory-to-the-ukrainian-miners/.

9. Olean Roschina, “Tsarev suggests surrendering Kryvyi Rih, Vilkul tells him to follow the Russian ship,” Ukrainska Pravda, March 20, 2022, https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/03/20/7332961/.

10. Ukrainian leftists like Viktoriia Pihul, Alexander Kravchuk, Vitalyi Dudin, and Yuliya Yurchenko, all members of Sotsialnyi Rukh, issued appeals for debt cancellation immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion and, as Pihul and Dudin noted in their articles, with the support of Ukrainian trade unions: Viktoriia Pihul, “People around the world demand IMF to cancel Ukraine’s unjust debt,” Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt, March 3, 2022, https://www.cadtm.org/People-around-the-world-demand-IMF-to-cancel-Ukraine-s-unjust-debt; Alexander Kravchuk, “To Help Ukraine, Cancel Its Foreign Debt,” Jacobin, March 8, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/03/ukraine-cancel-foreign-debt-imf-economic-conditions; Vitalyi Dudin, “To help Ukraine, cancel its foreign debt and expropriate Russian, Ukrainian oligarchs’ wealth abroad,” Green Left, March 10, 2022, https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/help-ukraine-cancel-its-foreign-debt-and-expropriate-russian-ukrainian-oligarchs-wealth; Yuliya Yurchenko, “Credit won’t work: Why Ukraine’s state debt must be cancelled,” Commons, April 28, 2023, https://commons.com.ua/en/why-ukraine-needs-change-debt-policy/. The Polish democratic socialist party Lewica Razem (Left Together) called on the day of the full-scale invasion for the European Central Bank to take over Ukraine’s debt obligations, Lewica Razem, “Let’s Free Ukraine from Debts!,” February 23, 2022, https://partiarazem.pl/aktualnosci/2022/02/24/uwolnijmy-ukraine-od-dlugow. Eric Toussaint brings Ukraine’s foreign debt crisis up to date in “Ukraine’s Debt: an instrument of pressure and spoliation in the hands of creditors,” Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt, January 16, 2025, https://www.cadtm.org/Ukraine-s-Debt-an-instrument-of-pressure-and-spoliation-in-the-hands-of.

11. Sotsialnyi Rukh expressed their anti-neoliberal and pro-ecosocialist demands as the best program to defend Ukraine in a resolution adopted at their October 5-6, 2024 membership conference, “”The Path to Victory and the Tasks of the Ukrainian Left,” Commons, October 5-6, 2024, https://rev-org-ua.translate.goog/rezolyuciya-shlyax-do-peremogi-ta-zavdannya-ukra%d1%97nskix-livix/?_x_tr_sl=uk&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp.

12. Red-Green Alliance, “A new and democratic green left in Ukraine,” Danish Institute for Parties and Democracy, https://dipd.dk/en/node/519.

14. Workers Aid to Ukraine, “Emergency funds needed for water in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine,” https://workersvoiceus.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Workers-Aid-to-Ukraine-Letter.pdf.

13. Ukraine Solidarity Network (US), “Support Ukraine’s Resilient Workers: Help Provide Generators,” https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-ukraines-resilient-workers-help-provide-generators.

Further interviews and statements with Yurii Somoilov:

“Employers use war to take away workers’ rights,” International Labour Network of Solidarity and Struggle, December 25, 2022, https://laboursolidarity.org/en/n/2480/employers-use-war-to-take-away-workers039-rights.

Federico Fuentes interviews Yuriy Samoilov: “Miners’ union leader: ‘Left-wing Ukrainians are fighting on the front and organising workers’,” Green Left, December 5, 2024, https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/miners-union-leader-left-wing-ukrainians-are-fighting-front-and-organising-workers.

“To Foreign Politicians — Justice for Ukrainian Workers!”, May Day Statement by Trade Union and Student Activists in Kryvbas (Kryvyi Rih Iron Ore Basin), Sotsialnyi Rukh, May 14, 2024, https://rev.org.ua/to-foreign-politicians-justice-for-ukrainian-workers/.

“From Lisbon to Kryvyi Rih: a conversation about labor struggles with Yurii Samoilov,” Commons, May 30, 2023, https://rev.org.ua/to-foreign-politicians-justice-for-ukrainian-workers/.

“A Ukrainian trade unionist talks to us!”, International Labour Network of Solidarity and Struggle, February 25, 2023, https://rev.org.ua/to-foreign-politicians-justice-for-ukrainian-workers/.

Author

  • Howie Hawkins has been involved with the Green Party since it’s first US meeting in 1984 and was the Green Party presidential nominee in 2020. A prolific author and organizer, Howie has been active in movements for civil rights, peace, labor, and the environment since the 1960s.

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