TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/073189/07318900.023

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 8KB | 139 lines

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