By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — "If we don't have any money, the price of the dollar can go up 10 times and it won't make any difference to us!", declares Lyudmila Tyulenko, sitting by a makeshift hut outside Moscow's main federal government office building.
Tyulenko views the collapse of Russia's financial system quite differently from the middle-class Muscovites who have been cramming into bank offices, trying desperately to extract their savings.
But Tyulenko's take on the situation is more typical of the way Russians see their country's most acute economic crisis since the hyperinflation of 1992. Surveys indicate that only about one in four Russians even have any savings to be wiped out.
For those whose rouble wages are no more than the Russian average — previously worth about US$180 a month, but now worth barely half that — western consumer goods were a rare treat anyway.
Things aren't as tough for most Russians as they are in Tyulenko's home town of Brindakit in Eastern Siberia. No money has arrived to pay workers in the remote goldmining settlement for three years. The miners live on berries and mushrooms from the forest, and fish from the rivers.
Weariness of bare subsistence has brought Tyulenko to the Russian capital to voice her community's grievances in the plastic-sheet protest camp set up by coalminers outside Moscow's so-called "White House". She is not the only person there who is scornful of the state's dilemmas.
"The miners suffered a financial crash long ago", Viktor Semyonov, a miners' union leader from the Vorkuta coalfields, and one of the key figures in the camp, remarks caustically. "That's why we've been here for the past three months."
Developments such as the sacking of Prime Minister Sergey Kiriyenko's government on August 23 have been met with indifference by the picketers — though in the case of the Kiriyenko sacking, they had a grandstand view of events. In what the protesters saw as a bizarre act of contrition, Kiriyenko and former first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov came out to the camp late in the evening following their dismissal.
Bearing a bottle of vodka, the two wanted to talk. Nemtsov, according to the miners, declared he was ready to sit alongside them, banging a helmet on the cobblestones in a now traditional gesture of discontent.
But the response from the protesters was unsympathetic, and the bottle of vodka was smashed after the visitors left. No doubt the picketers recalled the press conference earlier in August where Nemtsov had threatened prosecution of leaders of the "rail attacks", in which unpaid miners had blocked railway lines.
And how did the miners react to the effort to reinstate the former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin? "He's the one who created the problems we've got now", Semyonov states flatly.
The view that the crash of Russia's state finances means nothing to workers is perversely satisfying to people whose pay stopped coming long ago. Nevertheless, it is incorrect. Workers and pensioners will be the ones who take the heaviest blows from the inflation that is now gathering pace.
The result of this will be fresh bitterness in the labour collectives — and just conceivably, the growth and maturing of schemes of militant self-organisation such as those sprouting in the protest camp.
"An all-Russia strike committee has been formed!", enthuses picketer Tamara Mytkovskaya, chairperson of the Independent Union of Miners in the Siberian city of Belovo. "The plan is to build a social-political movement."
If there has been any really notable change in the camp over the months, it has been an increasingly political tone in the miners' rhetoric, together with a toughening of their demands. "All power to the strike committees!", one of the camp banners reads.
How long will the picket stay in place, Semyonov is asked. Until Yeltsin resigns? "We'll be here until we win", Semyonov replies. "And we didn't come here just because of Yeltsin. We came here because of the whole system."