By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Of the new breed of labour protests, one of the first to make the news took place on February 27 in the town of Salair, in Kemerovo province in Siberia. After going unpaid for some nine months, several hundred workers from a silver-lead mine stormed into the local administration offices, occupying them for the better part of a day. The protest ended only when provincial officials promised a 6 billion rouble (US$1.06 million) pay-out.
Then, on March 5, about 2000 nuclear submarine repair workers near Vladivostok in the Russian far east blocked a major highway for three hours, demanding that the government fund their plant and allow wages to be paid.
In April, similar battles began to be reported at the rate of several a week. Teachers in the city of Prokopyevsk, in the Kuzbass coal-mining region of central Siberia, seized a local official and held him hostage for 37 hours. Miners in the city of Kiselevsk, also in the Kuzbass, occupied the local administration building, blockading about 200 people inside.
Finally, public attention throughout Russia was gripped when a thousand miners and other workers in Anzhero-Sudzhensk, in the north of the Kuzbass, blocked the Trans-Siberian Railway for 16 hours after promised wages failed to arrive.
Time, it seems clear, is beginning to run out for a favourite strategy of the government — managing demand in the economy by clamming up on the payment of wages.
This strategy largely accounts for the only real economic success to which the authorities have been able to point — curbing inflation. Ignoring the schedules for paying out large sections of its own wage bill, and requiring privatised firms to come up with taxes before paying their workers, the government has suppressed consumer spending power. For lack of customers, sellers have kept price rises low.
However, there are practical limits to this strategy, quite apart from its dubious legality. With most wages wretchedly low to start with, their failure to arrive often spells semi-starvation. In more and more cases, workers are ready to commit acts of mass civil disobedience in order to extract the price of their labour.
Curiously, the explosions of popular defiance have had only a second-hand relationship to the efforts by the trade unions to force changes in the government's policies.
Liberal media commentators sighed with relief on March 27 when coal miners largely held aloof from an all-Russian protest action called by the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR). Sceptical of the peak union structures, and in some cases reassured by government promises that money was on its way, miners in most pits ignored the FNPR's call for strike action.
But by early April, it was clear that 674 billion roubles (US$118 million) that first deputy premier Anatoly Chubais had promised the Kuzbass miners during a visit in March would not be along any time soon. That left the 200,000 miners in the region owed wage arrears averaging three to four months.
At the Red Kuzbass pit in Kiselevsk, the arrears stretched back for as much as seven months. On April 7, about 80 miners refused to leave the coalface after their shift. Hundreds of their workmates, joined by miners from other pits and by unpaid communal services workers, then flocked to the city administration building. The ensuing occupation lasted for three hours.
At Anzhero-Sudzhensk, the miners had not been paid for six to eight months. On the morning of April 9, workers from all three mines in the city held a meeting at which they demanded that the debts be paid out, and that Chubais return to the region and answer for the government's deceptions.
Then, together with other unpaid workers, the miners marched to the railway line and lit a bonfire on the tracks. The action was finally called off after senior coal industry officials promised that part of the wages owed would soon be paid.
In Prokopyevsk, teachers had not been paid since last summer. On April 3, they seized the head of the city's education department at a school, declaring that they would hold him until the provincial authorities paid all salary arrears. The official was released after the city's deputy mayor issued an order suspending classes until the wage debt was handed over.
Meanwhile, the English-language Moscow Tribune reported, Prokopyevsk doctors had blockaded the local administration building. The action was called off following negotiations.
It is significant that the new wave of spontaneous direct action should be centred in the Kuzbass.
The heartland of Siberia's heavy industry, the Kuzbass in 1989 and 1991 was a key focus of the huge coal strikes that helped to end the Soviet regime. After a half-decade of collapsing investment, the region is now an industrial slum. The political mood of its inhabitants, once strong supporters of President Boris Yeltsin, is reportedly sullen and confused.
With unusually strong traditions of solidarity and labour militancy, but with little political consciousness or organisation, the Kuzbass workers are classic protagonists in the kind of protest actions in the region during the past few weeks — confrontational in style and zealously fought, but uncoordinated, and always at risk of being outmanoeuvred and bought off by employers and state officials.
Meanwhile, resolute labour actions have been breaking out in many other parts of Russia. Teachers have been especially prominent.
As of April 11, Russia's main education union reported, no fewer than 20,000 teachers were on indefinite strike in 19 of the country's 89 administrative regions. In the city of Kostroma, north-east of Moscow, half the schools were closed; teachers in the region had not been paid since December. In all, union officials stated, only 15 of Russia's regions did not owe money to their education workers.
In the large industrial centre of Yekaterinburg in the Urals, 300 workers employed on building the city's underground rail system were reported on April 14 to be continuing a week-old strike. The workers were owed wages from as far back as November.
In many struggles by workers in Russia during recent years, a key weapon has been hunger strikes, usually conducted on the work site. As well as allowing workers who have little economic muscle to draw attention to their grievances, this tactic often allows labour collectives to shut down production while circumventing laws that set stringent conditions for conventional stoppages.
On April 10, 44 workers at the largest thermal power plant in Arkhangelsk, north of Moscow, suspended a four-day hunger strike after being paid for the first time since October.
At the Primorsky power plant in the far east, more than 500 workers on April 11 declared themselves ready to join a hunger strike begun earlier by 26 of their workmates. If this expanded action goes ahead, already acute power shortages in the region will become dramatically worse. Residential buildings in Vladivostok are at present without electricity for six to eight hours most days.
The developments in the Kuzbass, however, suggest that the trend is away from such essentially passive methods as hunger strikes and toward more direct challenges to employers and the state authorities. The stress is also upon mass action, with the direct involvement of large numbers of rank and file workers.
For Russia's rulers, these changes spell an expanding popular resistance movement, and fierce class battles to come.
Nevertheless, forcing the government to abandon its policy of holding out on wages will require much more than gut-level militancy. The state's outrageous strategy can be defeated only by broad, sustained industrial and political campaigning.
However impressive the combativity shown by workers in the Kuzbass in recent weeks, lasting victories will require the militants to coordinate their actions and develop a consistent, properly thought-out program of demands. In the immediate term, there needs to be a new seriousness in orienting toward the opportunities provided by the readiness of national labour leaders to call all-Russian protest actions.