The mining and burning of coal constituted the dominant form of energy production throughout much of the globe in the first decades after WWII. Especially across the European and Asian continents—the major site of international tensions between the western Allied powers and the Soviet-led eastern bloc—coal-mining regions were often variously imagined as sites of autarkic innovation, national transformation, and civilizational development. These very same regions were frequently, however, permeated by an atmosphere of ungovernability, independence, and diversity. The nature of coal mining lent itself to solidaristic organization among laborers; regions in which this precious resource lay most abundantly often fell in peripheral territories; and the prospects of steady employment in this economic sector often attracted an ethnically mixed workforce. What political configurations emerged out of the interaction between the statist quest across post-WWII Eurasia to harness the energy of coal stores and these characteristic features of coal-mining regions?

This panel examines the relationship between the extraction of natural resources, ethnic politics, and state-propagated growth imperatives across post-WWII Eurasian coal-mining regions, bringing together analyses of the Polish city of Wałbrzych, the western German Ruhr area, the Svalbard Archipelago in the Norwegian Arctic, and the Karaganda coal basin in Soviet Kazakhstan. Its presenters consider developments in these regions from a variety of methodological perspectives, drawing on the works of environmental, economic, intellectual, social, political, and cultural historians. David Rubinstein explores the interaction between coal production, ethnic diversity, and state-sponsored campaigns of “Polonization” in early-post-WWII Wałbrzych, highlighting that a temporary slackening of nationalist boundaries to join diverse groups to the cause of economic reconstruction in this coal-mining city resulted in an eventual dismantling of cultural plurality. Nikolas Weyland investigates the early-post-WWII Polish state’s campaign to convince British and German authorities in the western German Ruhr to “repatriate” the so-called Ruhrpolen to Polish coal mining centers, which he argues belonged to a broader strategy of “energy transfer” that amalgamated industrial reparations and population relocation. Alina Bykova shifts the panel’s focus northward to the Norwegian Arctic, examining life in Soviet-established coal-mining settlements on the Svalbard Archipelago and contending that seeming Cold War divides belied significant cooperation between Norwegian and Soviet officials there in the face of daunting environmental conditions. Jonathan Raspe concludes the panel by moving its ambit eastward to the Karaganda coal basin in Soviet Kazakhstan, where a massive industrial enterprise built on the promise of modern development and the incorporation of ethnic Kazakh workers often served instead, he contends, to reinforce existing patterns of economic and ethnic inequality.

In sum, this panel seeks to deepen ongoing scholarly conversations over the place of coal-mining regions within wider extractive, social, geopolitical, and economic regimes in the post-WWII world, when an increasing bipolar global order emerged. Eschewing a singular national or continental framework and integrating the oft-separated post-WWII histories of Central Europe, the Arctic, and Central Asia, it aims to establish which shared experiences and overarching differences characterized everyday politics in coal-mining regions across these areas.