This dissertation traces the rise and fall of the Czechoslovak coal economy and its relationship to changing norms of masculinity. It is a story about the relationship between socialist citizens’ demands for energy consumption, the state’s efforts to meet those demands, and the gendered lives of the privileged class of workers on whom that goal depended: coal miners. Energy held a special and, within the historical scholarship, underappreciated position in the socialist conception of the good life. Even in the early post-World War II years, state planners prioritized providing citizens with sufficient heating fuel. By the 1960s, widespread electrification endowed people with a belief in a “right to light,” and one of the most famous protests of the socialist period broke out in 1967 among Prague university students when that right was violated. In the 1970s and 1980s, domestic energy consumption rose dramatically, and state planners suppressed consumer electricity and gasoline prices while wholesale costs skyrocketed. The growing gap between citizens’ high expectations for energy consumption and the diminishing ability of coal miners to meet them strained the very foundations of the socialist system. Nevertheless, state leaders continued to measure their society’s standard of living as a direct function of its energy consumption, despite their private worries that such dependence was untenable. In East Central Europe and around the world, the democratization of high-energy lifestyles depended on an explosion of fossil fuel consumption. This explosion in fossil fuel consumption required an even larger explosion in fossil fuel production, which depended on the labor of energy workers. This placed coal miners in a unique position vis-à-vis the state, and in Czechoslovakia miners as a professional class received preferential treatment, including an exemption from compulsorily military service, access to new apartments and automobiles, and high wages. Masculinity is essential to understanding the currents of power in a fossil fuel society. Cultivating a strong gendered identification between coal miners and their work was key to bolstering the welfare state’s precarious energy agenda. The socialist coal industry, and fossil fuel industries more broadly, relied upon and cultivated qualities coded as distinctly masculine in their workers, namely a high tolerance for bodily risk, stoicism in the face of injury, and quick, decisive decision making. Masculinity was not a side effect of fossil fuel work; it was the prescription. After the collapse of socialism in 1989 and ensuing deindustrialization, the ideal of comradely masculinity was replaced by a new ideal of entrepreneurial masculinity, one which most miners rejected in favor of an increasingly nostalgic view of the era of coal.
