By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Millions of workers across Russia struck and demonstrated on March 27 in one of the greatest outpourings of labour protest in the country's history. The key demand was for the prompt payment of spiralling wage debts.
The scale of the action — exaggerated by trade union leaders, and probably underestimated by the Interior Ministry and news media — has been the subject of sharp disagreements. But the March 27 "All-Russian Protest Action for Work, Law and Social Welfare" was by far the largest in a train of similar protests stretching back several years.
In Moscow, union leaders claimed that 140,000 people rallied near Red Square. While a more realistic figure would be about half that number, the gathering ranked with the largest political demonstrations in the capital since the Communist Party-led processions of Soviet times. The demonstration in St Petersburg the same day was reported to be almost as big.
Leaders of the mass trade union body, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR) claimed that more than 5 million workers in 16,200 enterprises and organisations stopped work for at least part of the day. The Interior Ministry reported that more than 1.8 million people took part in marches, rallies and pickets.
Rising debts
For the state authorities, the thought of an all-out labour campaign to secure the payment of wages is deeply alarming. Shortly before March 27, state sources put wage arrears across the economy at 53 trillion roubles, about US$9.3 billion. This figure had risen from 46 trillion at the new year.
In St Petersburg — by no means the city worst affected — a recent survey found that 47% of workers were suffering from "problems associated with wage payment delays". According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, every fourth rouble of wages in St Petersburg is not paid on time.
Of the total wage arrears, about 80% is owed by privatised firms rather than state organisations. But the government is not without blame. Tight-money policies, reflected in drastic cuts to state purchases and subsidies, have helped push thousands of enterprises into insolvency. An intensified tax collection campaign has left many more firms short of the funds to pay wages.
Meanwhile, the government's direct share in the wage arrears has grown from 12% in April 1996 to 20% at the beginning of March.
Russia's ruling groups tried during March to damp and deflect popular anger. President Boris Yeltsin ordered the government to prepare a detailed report by March 26 on the extent and causes of the wage debts. "I consider the situation with the mass delays in wage payments intolerable", Yeltsin was quoted as saying.
In particular, the government was anxious to dissuade coal miners from lending their weight to the March 27 action. On March 21, first deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais visited the Kuzbass coal region in Siberia. Before setting out, Chubais had the Finance Ministry transfer 170 billion roubles (about US$30 million) to pay local public sector debts in the Kuzbass.
Such concessions helped ensure that the miners' contribution to March 27 would be mostly symbolic. But the limited pay-outs allowed union leaders to point to immediate gains from the day of protest. FNPR chairperson Mikhail Shmakov reported that a total of $4 trillion roubles in overdue wages had been paid in response to the unions' plans for action.
Political vacuum
At its crudest level, the authorities' jitters showed up in the presence of 16,000 police, including anti-riot detachments, on the streets of Moscow on March 27. But no-one in ruling circles was panicking. While finding money for the Kuzbass miners, Chubais did not promise other workers that they would receive their entitlements from the state budget before December.
"Now everyone has gone home, and that is the end of it", the English-language Moscow Times editorialised smugly on March 28. "The government can ignore these displays of mass discontent because no party or movement exists that could turn the mass discontent ... into a potent political force."
For the present, that is clearly true.
The political organisation that might be expected to gain most from the labour protests is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). On March 27 the KPRF had an excellent chance to shine before the assembled workers as an organisation both more responsive to popular wishes than the FNPR leadership, and more committed to fighting for workers' rights.
Shmakov and other leaders of the FNPR have generally tried to restrict the union movement to purely economic demands. At almost all the demonstrations on March 27, Nezavisimaya Gazeta observed, the masses were far more radical than their leaders. At the Moscow rally, the "very moderate" meeting resolution proposed by the organisers was met with "hissing and a roar of disapproval".
The KPRF has been quick to voice the political demands — in particular, for the resignation of the government — that Russia's unpaid masses obviously want to hear. At a press conference on March 28, Aleksandr Kuvayev, the head of the party's Moscow city organisation, denounced Shmakov as "toothless" and as "absolutely detached from the people" for refusing to call for political changes.
But raising popular demands does not prove that the party is capable of turning the movement into a "potent political force". In the view of Moscow State University economist and political scientist Andrei Kolganov, the Communist Party is too historically compromised and politically confused to provide leadership for real masses of workers.
"It's also important to note the experience workers in Russia have had since the late 1980s", Kolganov explains. "When they've become mobilised, they've finished up being deceived, both by Yeltsin and by the Communist Party, which has been incapable of turning support into concrete gains."
Future of campaign
Kolganov sees the future of the FNPR's wages campaign as clouded. The FNPR has threatened a renewal of strike action if the government fails to make decisive concessions by the end of April. Another day of Russia-wide protest on May 1, Kolganov considers, might stir a bigger response than the action on March 27. But where could the movement go from this point?
"A prolonged general strike isn't a real option for the present", Kolganov says. "Russian workers have before them the example of the strike last autumn in the Donbass in Ukraine, where there were practically no gains."
Might a new party of the left provide the key to building an effective political movement of working people? "A series of attempts have been made to form such organisations", Kolganov notes, "but there's been no significant response from workers."
The reasons, as he sees them, include the limited experience that most workers in Russia have of labour struggles, combined with the fact that traditions of solidarity are relatively weak.
The latter problem, Kolganov remarks, was seen on March 27 in the attitude many work collectives took to the FNPR's strike call. "They took the view: You don't need to strike if your enterprise has orders and you've got work, and if there's no work, there's no point in striking."
Another reason the March 27 action failed to achieve a breakthrough is that, despite widespread misery, the situation of most workers is not yet intolerable. "The government's policy has been to maintain consumption, not production", Kolganov explains. "Overall consumption has been more or less stable since 1992, despite widening income differences. This has been achieved through drastic cuts in military spending and productive investment.
"Ultimately, you can't have consumption without investment. How long can the government keep up its present act? My guess is perhaps another year and a half."
"One of the tasks is to formulate a program that workers can feel confidence in", Kolganov maintains. "This needs to include both immediate demands and radical left demands that serve to educate activists.
"The ideas and analyses already exist. But unfortunately, the links between the intellectual forces of the left and the worker masses are even weaker now than they were three or four years ago. Even a good program formulated in these circumstances wouldn't necessarily get much of a hearing."
The key tasks, in Kolganov's view, thus include trying to create closeness and collaboration between the "intellectual left" and workers active in struggles. "The process will be slow", he predicts, "but a program will be developed, and the conditions will mature for workers to form their own mass political organisations".