Igor Smirnov - The Strike Campaign

The Strike Campaign

As communist states began to collapse at the end of the 1980s, people in some areas of the Soviet Union began to demand sovereignty for separate national identities. As the citizens of the Moldavian SSR debated the merits of introducing Moldovan as the official language of the republic—at first with Russian as a second official language and later without—the republic was divided over the issue of nationalizing Moldova. One side believed that Moldova should be independent from the Moscow Kremlin and turned into a nation-state, possibly in a union with Romania where a virtually identical language is spoken. The other believed that Moldova should remain a part of the supranationalist USSR, possibly in a post-communist, but still united country.

Smirnov and many of his colleagues were suspicious of the possibility of language laws from the very beginning — they suspected this to be the first step towards “nationalization” of the republic at the expense of “their country,” the Soviet Union. However, in August 1989, when it was leaked that Moldovan would be made the only official language, Smirnov and other industrial workers in Tiraspol banded together to create the United Work Collective Council (OSTK— Объединенный Совет трудовых коллективов) and called an immediate strike that eventually led to the shutdown of most major industrial activity (concentrated in the Transnistrian region) throughout the SSR.