Beyond "East" and "West." Cross-Block Entanglements of Strikes and Labor Disputes in Poland, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union in the 1980s

In the 1980s, labor movements were active on both sides of the "Iron Curtain." In Poland, Solidarity managed to establish itself as the first free union inthe Eastern Bloc. A few years later, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) organized a mass strike against Margaret Thatcher's plans to close pits deemed unprofitable. In 1989, miners' strikes erupted all over the Soviet Union. Despite their temporal proximity, these movements have not yet been explored within the same analytical framework. This article focuses on the transnational dimensions of Polish Solidarity and the miners' strike in Great Britain and reconstructs how they were perceived across the East-West divide and in which ways they generated cross-border acts of solidarity.