TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/073189/07318900.023

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.8 KB | 154 lines

                P    ╒                                                          WORLD, Page 22

SOVIET UNION

Revolution Down Below


Striking miners take Gorbachev's call to action seriously

By Bruce W. Nelan


    Coal miners walking off their jobs from the Ukraine to the
Arctic Circle. Ethnic gangs battling in Georgia. Thousands of
other dissatisfied workers threatening strikes. "The situation,"
said Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev last week as he surveyed
the turmoil rocking his vast country, "is fraught with
dangerous political and economic consequences." The question for
Gorbachev: Will the "revolution from below," which he has been
urging on his laggard countrymen, help accelerate his ambitious
plans for reform -- or tear the U.S.S.R. apart?

    At a meeting of national and regional party leaders last
week, he proposed his own partial answer. If the party was
blocking change by clinging to conservative attitudes, he
lectured, then "a purge should take place, a purge was needed."
He called for "an influx of fresh forces" affecting every level
from factory collectives to the Politburo. Vowed Gorbachev:
"This concerns everyone."

    The Kremlin was plainly alarmed that the strikes were
eroding the party's control. Since the 1930s, no one had
personified the state's ideal Soviet worker better than the
propaganda hero Alexei Stakhanov, the coal miner who reputedly
produced 14 times the daily norm. But there were no
Stakhanovites in the Soviet Union's biggest coalfields last
week. Wildcat strikes by more than 300,000 workers paralyzed
some 250 mines and factories in the Kuzbass and Donbass basins,
resulting in a 6 million-ton loss of production. The walkout
spread as far as the coalpits in Vorkuta in the far north and
Karaganda in the Kazakhstan Republic in Central Asia. And there
were rumblings that railroad workers might join in on Aug. 1,
an action that could paralyze the country. "Such developments
create a threat to the realization of the great plans we have
decided upon," warned Gorbachev, referring to his
economic-reform program.

    In front of Communist Party headquarters in the Ukrainian
city of Makeyevka, 5,000 miners in battered helmets, their faces
and overalls black with coal dust, staged a sit-in to demand
better working and living conditions; their ranks eventually
swelled to almost 150,000 from 94 mines. Far to the east, in the
Kuzbass in Siberia, the numbers were even greater. About 180,000
miners abandoned their pits to occupy central squares in nine
cities, plastering reviewing stands with homemade signs
proclaiming DOWN WITH BUREAUCRATS and KUZBASS: CLEAN AIR, MEAT
FOR EVERYONE, WE DEMAND SOCIAL JUSTICE.

    The strike spread with electrifying speed. The first 77
Kuzbass coal miners walked off the job in Mezhdurechensk on July
10. The following day 12,000 workers from five mines in the area
joined them. They drew up a list of demands, including better
pay, more vacation, higher pensions. Their overriding complaint:
despite Gorbachev's calls for greater local autonomy in managing
the economy, bureaucrats in Moscow continued to wield arbitrary
control over the mines and were holding back the bulk of their
profits. Many local officials openly sympathized with the
strikers. "Why not? They breathe the same air we do," said
Timuras Avaliani, 57, of the Kuzbass regional strike committee.

    The strike soon spread to nine other cities in the Kuzbass.
Grimy miners complained that when they came up after six hours
underground, they could not find a bar of soap to wash with;
the ration is one bar every two months. "Who can tell us what
to feed our husbands?" shouted a woman protesting empty shelves
in the stores. Many called for complete independence from
central planning, insisting the miners could run things
themselves.

    Moscow quickly dispatched a high-level delegation to meet
the strikers, led by Politburo Member Nikolai Slyunkov. Mikhail
Shchadov, the minister in charge of coal mines, had earlier
told the workers that they were not prepared for the
independence they were demanding. But after negotiating with
local strike leaders into the early hours of the morning, the
Moscow delegation finally agreed to sign a protocol promising
that the region's mines could decide on their production levels
and investments. The state would raise miners' pay for night
shifts by $50 a month, a 40% increase, improve food supplies and
spend more of the mines' profits on local housing. Slyunkov also
promised to increase supplies of food and soap.

    Sensing victory, the Mezhdurechensk miners went back to
work, but the strikes were just beginning elsewhere in the
Kuzbass and the Ukraine as workers pressed for assurance they
would share in the government concessions. At week's end the
strike in Kazakhstan was winding down, but workers in the
Donbass still held out over pension questions, prompting a
government pledge that all the issues would be considered
without delay.

    Strikes are not technically illegal in the Soviet Union;
the Marxist tenet that they are unnecessary in a proletarian
paradise has not kept them from happening. Until the Gorbachev
era, Communist rulers used bullets or gifts of consumer goods
to quell unruly workers. But under the impact of perestroika and
glasnost, work stoppages have become part of the economic
landscape.

    As he pushes ahead with reform, Gorbachev is having to
contend not just with strikes but also with constitutional
revolt in the independence-minded Baltic states and a wave of
ethnic violence in the Caucasus and central Asia. Only last week
bloody rioting that left 20 dead erupted between minority
Abkhazians and the Georgian majority in a Black Sea region of
western Georgia. Some 3,000 Interior Ministry troops were
dispatched to help local police quiet the unrest. But the
audacious mining walkout has presented Gorbachev with the most
serious labor challenge he has had to face, and casts in graphic
terms the cruel dilemma of perestroika: how to raise
productivity and living standards at the same time.

    Gorbachev appears to be attempting to turn the strike wave
into a deeper popular commitment to his aims. While he sounded
a warning that labor unrest "could damage everything we are
doing," he spoke almost admiringly of how the strikers were
behaving "in a responsible, organized and disciplined fashion."

    In fact, it would be difficult for Gorbachev to oppose the
workers' calls for greater independence from the dead hand of
Moscow ministries. That is a central ingredient in his plans to
revitalize the Soviet economy by encouraging local initiative.
But to be effective, the idea of self-reliance and
experimentation had to evolve into more than just a prescription
issued from the Kremlin. Gorbachev can take satisfaction and
possibly draw some political strength from the evidence in
Kuzbass and Donbass that workers may be stirring from the
"stagnation" of the Leonid Brezhnev years. The daily Sovetskaya
Rossiya put it succinctly: "Perestroika, which has until
recently been a `revolution from above,' is getting strong
support from below."

    Yet no matter how pleased Gorbachev may be to see a
political awakening among the indifferent Soviet citizens, he
must recognize that some of their economic demands are
potentially threatening. In addition to their attacks on the
bureaucracy, the strikers are demanding better food and housing
and more consumer goods. The government has responded by flying
in tons of supplies as a palliative, setting a costly and
hazardous precedent. Most of the Soviet population eats poorly
and lives in inferior housing. If workers everywhere rise up and
demand more and better, the system's stability could be
endangered.


-- Paul Hofheinz/Prokopevsk and John Kohan/Moscow