Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Labor Pains in the Soviet Union. May 27, 1991
The headquarters of the strike that has closed many of this country’s mines for the past two months is a room in the Hotel Rossiia, literally within a stone’s throw of Red Square. The room is occupied by delegates from the interregional strike (a k a workers’) committees. They come in and out, stopping long enough to smoke a few cigarettes, drink a cup of tea and exchange the latest information. This is a postmodern strike. In between arguments about whether the comrades can hold out until the Russian presidential election in June, they ask my advice about what kind of page scanners and TV monitors to order for the computers they have somehow obtained.
Among the room’s occupants is Yuri Boldyrev, a Donetsk miner who nearly two years ago was catapulted into a leading position in that city’s strike committee [see Siegelbaum, “Behind the Soviet Miners’ Strike,” October 23, 1989). Boldyrev has known the ups and downs of political notoriety. In the aftermath of the July 1989 strike, he waged an ultimately unsuccessful battle to unseat his mine’s director. At that time, when the miners conceived of their struggle in essentially economic terms, Boldyrev was one of the few with a political orientation. For him, asking the government for more food supplies and higher wages was secondary to the appropriation of the enterprises in which the miners toiled as serfs of the Ministry of Coal. But the failure of the government to fulfill its promises-or rather, the fact that the August 1989 agreement was overtaken by new shortages and, more recently, by imitation-succeeded in politicizing the miners. This was the case first in Vorkuta in the far north, then in the Kuzbas in Siberia and finally in the Donbas in the Ukraine.
This past March 1, eighteen mines in the Donbas began what was termed a warning strike. But in Vorkuta, the Kuzbas, and other mining areas the strike was a signal to go for broke. Within two weeks, some 140 mines were shut down and the chief demand had become the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev and the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet pending new, more democratic elections. Meanwhile, Boldyrev had regained the support of the miners who had elected him to the Donbas regional strike committee. It was this committee that sent him to Moscow.
” We were naive,” lie says, referring to the 1989 strike committee. “Those who were elected then were able to distinguish reliable from unreliable people on the basis of their experience in the mines. But when it came to dealing with ministerial officials and other plenipotentiaries from the Center [central government], they were taken in by demagogy and deceit.”
Demagogy and deceit fairly well sum up the state of Soviet political discourse at the moment. Pravda accuses the miners’ leadership of demagogy; the strike committees claim they were deceived by Gorbachev. They are not alone. Since the appointment last year of Valentin Pavlov as Prime Minister, the credibility of the Soviet government has plummeted. The recall of large-denomination notes earlier this year and the lame excuse offered by Pavlov, who claimed Western capital was plotting to destroy the Soviet Union’s financial structure, provoked outrage and bewilderment. The price increases imposed by Pavlov on April 2, which were as high as 300 percent, plus the disastrously named “presidential tax” of 5 percent, added fuel to the flames of discontent. Whether those shock-therapy measures will succeed in closing the gap between the heavily subsidized state sector and the free market is almost beside the point. There is a profound lack of trust in the doctor administering the treatment.
In April, as the Center foundered, social protest and initiatives by republican governments fed on one another. Boris Eltsin asked for and received enhanced powers from the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies; Pavlov reached an agreement with handpicked “representatives” of the mining industry only to have it rejected by the regional strike committees and the Independent Miners’ Union, with which the strike committees are closely affiliated; the Georgian Parliament declared that republic’s independence; and in Minsk, workers organized a general strike to press for the sovereignty of the Belorussian Republic. In the meantime, the miners’ strike committees continued to plot strategy, forging links with other social and parliamentary groups in preparation for a series of actions that was to culminate in an all-Union walkout on April 26.
“The workers’ committees are the last hope of the people.” This is not Boldyrev speaking but Igor Zorkin, a delegate from Novokuznetsk (Kuzbas), whose handshake nearly knocks me over. “We are supported by the intelligentsia-teachers, doctors, engineers. We see to the needs of pensioners, too,” he says in the deliberate manner of one unaccustomed to speaking with foreigners. And what about the steelworkers, whose voices have been noticeably absent from those supporting the miners? Zorkin claims that the steelworkers are with the miners and that in Novokuznetsk they have contributed money to the strike fund. Still, it is unclear which way the steelworkers and others dependent on coal supplies will go whether they will be persuaded that the miners’ cause is their own, or whether the government can convince them that the miners’ strike is unnecessary and a hindrance to the government’s own anti-crisis program.
What, after all, is the miners’ cause? “We just want to live better:’ says a strike committee leader in the documentary film Perestroika From Below (Past Time Productions). That was nearly two years ago. At that time, the most ambitious of the miners’ demands was a radical restructuring of their industry. Since then, they have learned the hard way that such restructuring is impossible without fundamental political change; hence, the demands in the current strike for political decentralization and the “departization” of the police and army. Tactical considerations also are involved here. Having failed to get a fair shake from the Center, the miners in the Russian Republic have pinned their hopes on Eltsin and the Russian Democrats, while those from the Donbas have made common cause with the Ukrainian independence movement, Rukh.
The kind of deal that can be expected from those quarters is also uncertain, but it probably includes a large dose of privatization. That might be abhorrent to the Western left, but not to Soviet miners. Even (or especially?) among leading activists there is a magic aura to private ownership. As Evgeny Zykov told me, sitting at a desk in the Independent Miners’ Union executive office, “We want a capitalist Russia.” It turns out, though, that this “capitalist Russia” would contain features hard to find in any actually existing capitalist country: social justice, self-management, a sense of proprietorship among producers. This is a big contradiction, one that perhaps only dialecticians can fully appreciate. That which officially has been called socialism-but which Boldyrev shrewdly dubs ministerial feudalism-has discredited the very concept of a socialist society. Yet, in reaction to what “socialism” has brought, the miners want something approximating the socialist ideal, except they call it capitalism.
This is not the only contradiction. The mines of the Donbas are nearly worked out. To make them productive in a truly competitive environment would be prohibitively expensive or at least cause most miners to lose their jobs. The most productive mines in the Soviet Union are in the Kuzbas. But they are in the most lethally polluted area of the entire country. These different though universally depressing circumstances occasionally give rise to divisions among the miners’ committees, to “local patriotism,” as Boldyrev sadly acknowledges. Then there are the political coalitions that the miners have formed. At the moment, Eltsin needs the Russian miners as much as they need him, and the same is true of Rukh and the miners of the Donbas. But that is only because they have a common enemy in the Center. As the opinion polls suggest, the public regards Eltsin with only slightly less suspicion than Gorbachev. As for Rukh, its roots and heart lie in the western Ukraine, far from the Donbas.
The fragility of the political coalitions became apparent in late April. Shortly after returning from a state visit to Japan, Gorbachev-that Houdini of Soviet politics -announced an agreement between himself and nine republican presidents, including Eltsin. Covering a broad range of issues, the agreement called for an end to political strikes, specifically the miners’ strike, and “the introduction of a special regime of work in the basic branches of industry.” The miners were stupefied. “Of course, this can be explained in various ways,” a Kuzbas strike committee leader told a correspondent from Nezavisimaia Gazeta, a Moscow newspaper that had been covering the strike sympathetically. “But I think that Eltsin has betrayed us. ” Eager to minimize the damage to his popularity, Eltsin traveled to the Kuzbas coalfields, where he promised strike leaders that the mines would soon come under the jurisdictional control of the Russian Republic, as they did on May 6. Such legislation has also been prepared by the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet with respect to that republic’s mines.
Meanwhile, the April 26 all-Union strike action, timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, proved to be far less impressive than strike leaders had predicted. As miners drifted back to work, the interregional delegates abandoned their room in the Hotel Rossiia. For the time being, the miners are working their shifts and coal is again being extracted. After all the demagogy and deceit, this May Day was hardly an occasion for celebration.
Source: Lewis Siegelbaum, “Labor Pains in the Soviet Union; miners’ hopes deferred,” The Nation, 27 May 1991, pp. 693-694.