Whether it makes more sense to conceive of the miners of the Donbas and their collective representation as confronted by forces analogous to fourteenth-century western Europe or sixteenth-century eastern Europe, clearly theirs has not been an easy lot since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, much the same can be said for the overwhelming majority of other workers. What distinguished the miners, however, was not extraordinary privation but rather their sustaining of an "independent" movement determined to create a "normal life" for themselves and their families. Now increasingly demoralized and numbering no more than 400,000, they probably no longer have what it takes to continue to do so.
