Igor Smirnov, the president of Pridnestrovskaia Moldavskaia Respublica, is a trade union organizer and former political prisoner. His party suffered a defeat in the country's most recent Parliamentary elections but his personal popularity remains high.

Igor Smirnov

Igor Smirnov was never a professional politician. For nearly thirty years, the man who is today the president of Pridnestrovie worked as a welder and a press operator in a factory. There, just like Brazil's Luis Ignacio "Lula" da Silva, another welder-turned-president, he cut his first political teeth as a trade union organizer. Inspired by the style of Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland's Solidarity trade union, Smirnov used the power of the trade unions to bring political change not just to the factory but to society as a whole.

Just two years older than Lech Walesa, Igor Smirnov, too, went on to lead an independence movement which brought his country to freedom during the Glasnost-days of the late Soviet Union.

In 1987, Igor Smirnov was elected head of "Electromash", a machine-building plant in Tiraspol, today the capital of Pridnestrovie. There, he organized strikes for the self-determination of Pridnestrovie and got workers of other factories to join him against oppression.

Smirnov's trade union members urged him to stand in a local Tiraspol election in February, 1990. This was his first time ever as a candidate. In a dramatic challenge to the power of the Communist Party, Smirnov beat his official challenger, the First Secretary of the city’s Central Party Committee, Leonid Tsurkan, by a 2-to-1 margin.

Political prisoner; freed by civil disobedience
Pridnestrovie declared independence on 2 September 1990, with Igor Smirnov active in the self-determination movement from the very beginning. Less than a year later, on a visit abroad on 29 August 1991, Igor Smirnov was arrested by the secret service of Moldova and taken to solitary confinement in Chisinau.

During his time as a political prisoner, grassroots activists organized civil disobedience and nonviolent protests to get him freed. In a sit-down strike worthy of Gandhi, a group of women blocked the country's main railroad, and stopped the trains on the routes Chisinau-Tiraspol-Odessa and Chisinau-Tiraspol-Moscow. At the beginning there were 10, after that 20, 100, then 1,000. Day and night, they sat down on the railroad tracks and protested. This peaceful protest led to the freedom of Moldova's first political prisoner, Igor Smirnov, and his return to Tiraspol, the capital of Pridnestrovie.

The main governing party, Respublica, suffered a defeat in the most recent Parliamentary elections when they lost to opposition party Renewal.

Igor Smirnov is married, has two sons and four grandchildren.