Strikes continued to heat up in the next month, and later broke out in March and April 1991 with support from Russian anti-communist leader Boris Yeltsin.

Particularly from the rule of Joseph Stalin, increased productivity was encouraged by the Soviet state at the cost of workers' well-being under the Stakhanovite movement.

[3] The Stakhanovite movement had occasionally been revived after Stalin's 1953 death, particularly after Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1986.

Industrial pollution was rampant in coal-mining regions; in certain parts of the Kuznetsk Basin of Siberia, life expectancy was ten years below the national average as a result of open-pit mining and scarce water resources and arable land.

[8] The success of Gorbachev's perestroika campaign had made long-thriving local corruption intolerable, and greater knowledge of the West drove citizens to view the Soviet bureaucracy as dishonest and ineffective.

In a May 1991 interview, Donbas strike leaders Mykhail Krylov and Yuri Makarov expressed the belief that an independent Ukrainian state would ensure Ukraine's economic self-governance and viewed it as positive.

According to a 2019 post by Sergeyev on the website of the Independent Union of Miners, the first such spontaneous strike happened in Osinniki, Kemerovo Oblast in February.

David E. Hoffman wrote for The Washington Post in 1998 that the miners had "found there was no soap to wash up after work," and promptly launched a strike.

"[18] 11 July has been celebrated by Russia's independent trade unionists as "miners' solidarity day", marking the anniversary of the strikes, since 1990.

They were regarded warmly by the usually-conservative daily newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, which described the strikes as "lending [perestroika] a hand from below.

Krylov claimed that the government cut off the strike committees' lines of communication to prevent them from organising with other industries, and disparaged them in the press.

[12] This opposition motivated the miners of the Donbas to take on political demands, namely calling for Shcherbytsky and Valentyna Shevchenko, Chairwoman of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, to be removed from office.

At the meeting, it was agreed to adopt a resolution urging Soviet political leadership to accept the workers' demands, as well as to launch a "preventive" strike under the local government's auspices.

On 7 August the party's Central Committee met to discuss the strikes; at the meeting, the party engaged in wide-reaching self-criticism and criticism of the Soviet government, condemning minister for the coal industry Mikhail Shchadov for ignoring miners' needs and local leaders for allowing food, housing and financial insecurity among miners to escalate.

A month later, Shcherbytsky was removed as First Secretary of the party and replaced with Vladimir Ivashko, a mining engineer[27] who was seen by the public as a protégé of Gorbachev.

[30] The same day, Ukrainian coal miners launched a strike also demanding Gorbachev's resignation and the dissolution of the Congress of People's Deputies, as well as recognition of the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine.

Viacheslav Chornovil, de facto leader of Ukraine's dissident movement and chairman of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, spoke to Radio Liberty on 21 July describing the strikes as "a new stage of perestroika" which was "tearing down the veil of party demagoguery regarding the unity of the party and the people" both in Russia and Ukraine.

[35] Canadian historian David R. Marples has claimed that the Ukrainian Helsinki Union and People's Movement of Ukraine utilised the strikes to advance public support for their policies,[36] but Ukrainian historian Taras Kuzio disputed this, saying that the miners were originally distrustful of dissidents as they were of outsiders and figures of authority in general.

[18] American researcher Lewis Siegelbaum has partially corroborated Sergeyev's recollections, saying that miners "worked closely, if surreptitiously, with the so-called 'democrats' ranged around Gorbachev's rival, Boris Eltsin [sic]" before supporting him in the 1991 Russian presidential election.

The size of the strike, and its hitherto unprecedented nature, was cast by researcher Leonid Gordon as giving the necessary impetus to Gorbachev to implement the 500 Days Program.

[31][41] In both countries, however, miners were ultimately let down by post-Soviet shock therapy and stark socio-economic inequality which manifested itself in the face of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.