of the Nova Kakhovka Machine-Building Factory. With his college diploma, Smirnov continued to be promoted. He soon became the shop director, then assistant to the factory's chief industrial upgrades and new technologies engineer and finally an assistant director. While he was not made director in 1987 when that position's erstwhile occupant retired, he was given the directorship of the "Elektromash" Electronics Concern in the nearby Moldovan city of Tiraspol.<ref>"Igor Smirnov—kandidat [v prezident PMR] naroda", in Nepriznannaia respublika: ocherki, dokumenty, khronika: dokumenty gosudarstvennykh organov Pridnestrovia, Vol. I, Gryzlov, V.F., ed. (Moscow: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, TIMO, 1997), 20.</ref> This was just over two years before Smirnov led the city's municipal government as the chairman of the Tiraspol city soviet and just under three before he held the most powerful position in the embryonic, and unrecognized, Pridnestrovian Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic. The strike campaign As communist states began to collapse at the end of the 1980s, people in some areas of the Soviet Union began to demand sovereignty for separate national identities. As the citizens of the Moldavian SSR debated the merits of introducing Moldovan as the official language of the republic—at first with Russian as a second official language and later without—the republic was divided over the issue of nationalizing Moldova. One side believed that Moldova should be independent from the Moscow Kremlin and turned into a nation-state, possibly in a union with Romania where a virtually identical language is spoken. The other believed that Moldova should remain a part of the supranationalist USSR, possibly in a post-communist, but still united country. Smirnov and many of his colleagues were suspicious of the possibility of language laws from the beginning, they suspected this to be the first step towards "nationalization" of the republic at the expense of "their country", the Soviet Union. However, in August 1989, when it was leaked that Moldovan would be made the only official language, Smirnov and other industrial workers in Tiraspol banded together to create the United Work Collective Council (OSTK – Объединенный Совет трудовых коллективов) and called an immediate strike that eventually led to the shutdown of most major industrial activity (concentrated in the Transnistrian region) throughout the SSR. Entry into politics When the strike campaign, from 16 August to 22 September 1989, failed to produce much of an effect in Chişinău, the OSTK re-examined its tactics. Smirnov and others saw the upcoming Moldovan elections as an