Labin Republic

In March 1921, around two thousand miners in the Istrian town of Labin walked off the job, protesting both the exploitative practices of the mine owners and a recent fascist attack on union representatives in Trieste. The immediate trigger was the owners’ refusal to pay a February bonus because the miners had taken a holiday on Candlemas, a day the management had abolished but which the workers considered second only to the feast of Santa Barbara.

The workforce was a mix of Italians, Croats, Slovenes, Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Hungarians, led by Giovanni Pippan, Giacomo Macillis, and Giulio Zustovich. After Pippan was beaten by fascists at a railway station on March 1, the miners occupied the mine works on March 3, joined by local peasants. On March 7, they proclaimed a self-governing republic, with the slogan “The mine is ours,” organized a government and a Red Guard for security, and began running production themselves.

On April 8, Italian authorities sent a thousand soldiers to crush the uprising; the miners resisted strongly but were eventually subdued. Fifty-two miners were arrested and sent to prisons in Pola and Rovigno, but lawyers Edmondo Puecher, Guido Zennaro, and Egidio Cerlenizza secured their acquittal at trial. Though short-lived, the Labin Republic left a lasting mark on the region and is remembered as an early, multi-ethnic armed stand against fascism. The story was later turned into a 1985 Yugoslav film, The Red and the Black.