Sketches of the Strike

Nina Maksimova, The Strike: Sketches for a Portrait of a Phenomenon. November 1989

Original Source: Ekho, No. 11, November 1989.

I didn’t recognize the workers whose houses I had gone to so many times in preparing my articles. At that time I had been struck by the subdued manner with which they automatically accepted the regular revisions of their quotas, which made their work cheaper and sweated more and more out of them (I still wasn’t prepared to call it by its exact name: exploitation). They accepted the notorious “correlation between labor productivity growth and wage hikes,” a reformera invention of nameless economists, which at times made it impossible for the workers to get their full wages. The workers had been controlled and manipulated by pitting them one against another, which technique, according to Engels, the capitalists had employed early in the nineteenth century for the same purpose. I can’t understand by what miracle workers’ solidarity had survived and brought them to the square. People who had resigned themselves to violence and arbitrariness as if to fate and whom a quota setter could sidetrack were now presenting demands to the government.

This is how they understand their situation now:

“Every worker feeds five to seven administrators.”

“We’re niggers! We have a slave-owning system. No one respects us.”

In their eyes there is no longer any hopeless submission. And this is not the crowd about whom [Alexander] Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Red Wheel [After his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn undertook the gigantic task of rewriting Russian history, in a series of novels, to prove that the evil doctrine of Marxism came from the West. The Red Wheel is one of these huge historical novels.] and which, in Academician [Vladimir] Bekhterev’s opinion, combines and aggravates all the worst traits of humanity. At this time I almost believed in the possibility of collective reason and even of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Sometimes it seemed that all those at the square already constituted a single entity. Anokhin, the aforementioned member of the city strike committee, said that the square reminded him of the science-fiction Solaris (the “thinking ocean,” from Lem’s novel). [Solaris is the name of a novel by Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem.]

And this made the moments of disunity even more tormenting. A barrier of alienation arose between the strike committees and the strikers, the podium and the square. The other towns didn’t avoid this. Even exchanges of experiences didn’t help. A representative from Mezhdurechensk who had come to Prokopevsk appealed to the miners “not to repeat the mistakes” made by the miners in Mezhdurechensk and cautioned them against schisms and mistrust in the strike committee. He was jeered as a strikebreaker: Mezhdurechensk was no longer on strike. People didn’t want to listen to him. And soon Prokopevsk repeated Mezhdurechensk’s “mistakes,” for which one could discern natural and common causes.

The democracy of the strike gradually faded. People stopped passing the microphone from hand to hand freely in the square and it became moored to its traditional spot at the podium. Obviously one couldn’t just go up to the podium and say anything. Sometimes only members of the strike committees and the press were allowed onto the podium. And not everyone could get into the building where the regional strike committee and the government commission were located. People were admitted only with credentials, and only members of the strike committees were issued credentials, the same kind of “red covers”[Communist party membership cards] that the rank-and-file strikers so disliked.

The entire committee spent more time with the authorities. They made an effort for the people and stood up for the interests of the strikers. But they consulted less and less with the square, although they promised to “consult with everyone.” There was more and more silence and secrecy. And the square sensed this.

On July 18, in the daytime, the Kuznetsk Coal Region radio broadcast a speech by Avaliani, the chairman of the regional strike committee. He read and commented on a “Report on Steps to Correct the Situation in the Kuznetsk Coal Region,” which had been signed by the strike committee and the government commission. He tried to convince the audience that a great deal had already been accomplished (first and foremost, there was an agreement to give the miners economic independence). But the people at Victory Square didn’t listen to this speech. The strikers demanded that the regional strike committee come to the square rather than talk to them on the radio. The strike committee referred to technical difficulties. But in the old days radio reports of the holiday demonstrations were broadcast all the time from Victory Square! As a symbol of protest the Prokopevsk miners turned off the radio. And now no one knew anything more about the “Report” or about the appeal to stop the strike.

Three hours after Avaliani’s appeal to the strikers, Vladimir Makhanov, the chairman of the Prokopevsk strike committee, signed a resolution to temporarily halt the strike. Seven hours later he went to the podium. Perhaps he wanted to prepare people for a message concerning the document he had signed? He read it slowly, explaining every point and translating mysterious jargon into the plain language of the workers.

Makhanov would call the following day, July 19, the most difficult. On that morning, when the members of the strike committee appeared on the podium the square was already in an uproar. The crowd had received its first information on what had been reported about Prokopevsk to the entire country and to the strikers in the towns of the Kuznetsk Coal Region.

An agitated resident of Novokuznetsk said that in his city they had received a telegram supposedly sent by the Prokopevsk city strike committee. It stated that the strike should be stopped and that the strike committees should be converted into workers’ committees. It had been signed by Makhanov and Naidov, the general director of the Prokopevsk Hydraulic Coal Mining Amalgamation. Afterward, the Novokuznetsk strike committees resigned their commissions, and the miners didn’t know what to do.

The miners of Kiselevsk had been informed that Prokopevsk was already back at work. But they checked and sent a messenger. The factories in Prokopevsk had also sent confused messengers. They had also been told that the miners had decided to stop the strike.

The members of the strike committee were summoned to give a reply. Makhanov walked up to the barrier.

“I didn’t give anyone a telegram. And I signed a resolution to halt the strike, but it was merely a recommendation. You are the only ones with the right to continue or to stop the strike.”

“Did they put pressure on you? Did they buy you off? Did you sell out? They greased them there.”

“Guys, don’t get scared. No one put any pressure on me. The committee adopted the resolution on its own, without the authorities.”

The microphone and telephone on the podium went dead “on their own.” A message arrived indicating that the trade union committees no longer had a way to feed the strikers (although all of them, with the exception of the trade union committee at the Kalinin mine, were still bringing food at the time). The resolution of the city strike committee to temporarily halt the strike was read several times over the radio, accompanied by appropriate speeches by a prosecutor, a doctor, and a schoolteacher. A nameless voice on the radio said: “We request that you immediately clear the square and go back to work.” Apparently the authorities were trying to “speed up the conclusion of the strike” by confusing the strikers with disinformation and prodding them from behind. But these administrative maneuvers had the opposite effect.

People muttered, “For decades they’ve been herding us into a stall.”

The square expressed its mistrust for all the strike committees, trade union committees, amalgamation directors, and city authorities and demanded their removal and new elections. People were already disbelieving the authorities, the party, the mass media, and each other. People said that there was no need to go to the mines to walk the picket line and change shifts. All the shifts should gather on the square to form a “united fist” and “stand up to the end.” At the peak of the fervor, the square decided that the whole city would go on strike. Even several vitally essential organizations came to a halt. From time to time, miners from Kiselevsk came to Prokopevsk, and on one occasion several hundred came. They exchanged information and encouraged one another: “Hold on! Don’t give in to provocations! We’re with you!”

The miners stubbornly refused to “clear” the square. No matter how rough they had it (they slept right on the asphalt and didn’t always eat on time), they experienced moments of unity, cleansing, and enthusiasm. But what would happen if they were to go back to the mines? This is what the strikers said: “If we go now without getting everything, we won’t rise up again.” “The bosses will strangle all of us one by one.” “They’ll put the most active people behind bars, and intimidate everyone else.” “They’ll pass a law on strikes which will be so tough that no one will even dare raise his head. And if you complain, you’ll be an ‘enemy of the people,’ just like in 1937.” They didn’t believe the prosecutor when he tried to convince them that a law would not be passed without discussion by all the people. They were afraid to leave. And they were afraid to stay: Why had policemen been sent to Prokopevsk from Novokuznetsk? The miners demanded that Gorbachev and Ryzhkov come. They demanded that the members of the government commission come back to the square as they had promised.

But the government commission didn’t come back to the square. They negotiated only with the strike committee. I was present at their meeting in the conference hall of the city party committee when they signed the next “Report on Steps” (for Prokopevsk). Initially, Nikolai Sliunkov, the Central Committee secretary and chairman of the government commission, uttered the familiar words that everything must be done for the sake of man and in the name of man, that the Kuznetsk Coal Region would get help and that a comprehensive development program for the region was in the works. (What kind of a program? I’ve lived in the area for more than ten years, and I’ve heard of all kinds of “comprehensive programs.”) Then he read aloud a draft of the agreement, which had been handed to him, and issued orders concerning every point, indicating the times and “persons responsible for implementation.” There was something fascinating about the way in which the “waving of a powerful hand” made it possible to build power and heating plants, hog farms, and water systems, to provide scores of buses, road maintenance machinery, and street sweepers, and to lend millions of rubles to the miners for garden cottages.

But the fairy tale was ruined by a question from a member of the strike committee: Where had several of the miners’ demands gone? “I don’t know,” the chairman shrugged his shoulders, without demonstrating any interest in their disappearance.

Afterward, when I compared the “Report on Steps” and the strikers’ program of demands, I made a discovery. The program had not just been abridged. It had been almost completely ignored. The report had been fabricated, judging by all appearances, out of whole cloth by a bureaucrat who knew what “facilities” the city was lacking but who did not include all the complaints of the miners against the authorities. There was no demand to reexamine the issue of the allocation of apartments in a twelvestory prestige building. There were no “expressions of mistrust” in officials. There was no demand to “keep from harassing the strikers.” It was all quite different. Does that mean that once again someone else was doing the workers’ thinking for them?

When Sliunkov concluded his speech almost all the members of the strike committee raised their hands to ask questions.

“No,” Sliunkov said, firmly putting a period at the end. “Today I’ll be talking to the entire region on the radio.”

For fifteen minutes there was shouting in the conference hall. The members of the strike committee, as if they had regained consciousness, said over and over again with dismay: “How can we go out onto the square? What will we tell the people?” One of them asked the first secretary of the city party committee: Who had given the order to “cut off’ the strike committee’s telephone? The first secretary swore up and down in fear that he had had nothing to do with it (but later, when he talked to me, he didn’t deny his part in it). Another member shouted at the petrified mayor: “You have to be decent! Honest!” And a delegate from Nizhny Tagil walked between one group and another in confusion, asking for coal for his steel mill. His blast furnace had already shut down, soon the coke ovens would begin to fall apart, and the steelworkers wouldn’t get paid.

Legachev, the deputy chairman of the strike committee, called for a vote: “Should we start shipping or not?”

No one voted: “How can we authorize any shipments without consulting with everyone?”

The mayor, having recovered from his shock, gave some advice: “But you can handle them. Why are you letting the square lead you? They trusted you, so you decide. Otherwise you’re taking on government responsibilities.”

Legachev once again called for a vote. The vote was unanimous in favor of allowing shipments. Evidently the mention of “government responsibilities” persuaded them. The strike committee already knew that it couldn’t “get involved in politics.” In the early days of the strike they had been reminded of this by the head of the local office of the KGB.

The square greeted the committee with whistles and shouts. “Tell us everything!”

Makhanov began to read and explain the “Report on Steps for Prokopevsk” (but not all the way through). He had no microphone. The square couldn’t hear him. Somebody figured out what was going on and brought his personal tape recorder with a microphone up to the podium. Makhanov informed the crowd of the strike committee’s decision to “ship a minimum amount of coal” to Nizhny Tagil. He reminded them of the strike committee’s decision to temporarily halt the strike. He asked everyone on the square to gather with the workers from his own mine and discuss the decision. There was more whistling and shouting. But Makhanov didn’t come unhinged. He remained calm, saying, “Comrades, comrades, we have to listen to one another.” Ultimately he managed to round up and convince the workers from his own central mine that the government commission “had made major concessions.” But no one had yet convinced the whole square of this. And the square remained steadfast and insisted on continuing the strike and on not shipping any coal. Makhanov didn’t even talk the miners into allowing shipments to defense plants, although with a knowing tone of voice he reminded them that in this case the strikers “were getting mixed up in politics.”

Opinions are opinions, but in real life everything happens the way it happens. And there was the perception that there was no longer any chance to change anything. The workers, who were not in the least embarrassed by the presence of women, cursed the bosses, the strike committee members, and each other at the top of their lungs. There was irritation, hostility, and rudeness. Solaris had turned into a mob.

And suddenly it became calm. And for the hundredth time I was surprised at how much and how little people need in order to become human beings again. It turned out that a woman’s words were needed, words from Makhanov’s mother, who came to the square every evening. She didn’t give a clue of how the shattered hopes would be restored or how the relationships between the strikers and their committee should be in the future. Her words contained nothing but compassion: “Guys, don’t be cannibals.”

People, voices, and words became less harsh. And from the square one could hear like a moan the words: “Why are they always trying to trick us?”

The strike committee was left “in power.” The chairman was sent home to get some sleep. (“He’s tired. It’s hard to walk among generals.”) Twelve hours later the strike was temporarily halted. The miners left Victory Square.

“The miners are walking away. Was it a victory or a defeat?” was the question the Shakhterskaia Pravda [Miner’s Truth] newspaper of Prokopevsk asked itself and its readers. I myself don’t know.

Source: Isaac Tarasulo, ed., Perils of Perestroika: Viewpoints from the Soviet Press, 1989-1991. Wilmington: SR Books, 1992.

Comments are closed.