Soviet Union Revolution

By Bruce W. Nelan

Coal miners walking off their jobs from the Ukraine to the Arctic Circle. Ethnic gangs battling in Georgia. Thousands of other dissatisfied workers threatening strikes. "The situation," said Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev last week as he surveyed the turmoil rocking his vast country, "is fraught with dangerous political and economic consequences." The question for Gorbachev: Will the "revolution from below," which he has been urging on his laggard countrymen, help accelerate his ambitious plans for reform -- or tear the U.S.S.R. apart?

At a meeting of national and regional party leaders last week, he proposed his own partial answer. If the party was blocking change by clinging to conservative attitudes, he lectured, then "a purge should take place, a purge was needed." He called for "an influx of fresh forces" affecting every level from factory collectives to the Politburo. Vowed Gorbachev: "This concerns everyone."

The Kremlin was plainly alarmed that the strikes were eroding the party's control. Since the 1930s, no one had personified the state's ideal Soviet worker better than the propaganda hero Alexei Stakhanov, the coal miner who reputedly produced 14 times the daily norm. But there were no Stakhanovites in the Soviet Union's biggest coalfields last week. Wildcat strikes by more than 300,000 workers paralyzed some 250 mines and factories in the Kuzbass and Donbass basins, resulting in a 6 million-ton loss of production. The walkout spread as far as the coalpits in Vorkuta in the far north and Karaganda in the Kazakhstan Republic in Central Asia. And there were rumblings that railroad workers might join in on Aug. 1, an action that could paralyze the country. "Such developments create a threat to the realization of the great plans we have decided upon," warned Gorbachev, referring to his economic-reform program.

In front of Communist Party headquarters in the Ukrainian city of Makeyevka, 5,000 miners in battered helmets, their faces and overalls black with coal dust, staged a sit-in to demand better working and living conditions; their ranks eventually swelled to almost 150,000 from 94 mines. Far to the east, in the Kuzbass in Siberia, the numbers were even greater. About 180,000 miners abandoned their pits to occupy central squares in nine cities, plastering reviewing stands with homemade signs proclaiming DOWN WITH BUREAUCRATS and KUZBASS: CLEAN AIR, MEAT FOR EVERYONE, WE DEMAND SOCIAL JUSTICE.

The strike spread with electrifying speed. The first 77 Kuzbass coal miners walked off the job in Mezhdurechensk on July 10. The following day 12,000 workers from five mines in the area joined them. They drew up a list of demands, including better pay, more vacation, higher pensions. Their overriding complaint: despite Gorbachev's calls for greater local autonomy in managing the economy, bureaucrats in Moscow continued to wield arbitrary control over the mines and were holding back the bulk of their profits. Many local officials openly sympathized with the strikers. "Why not? They breathe the same air we do," said Timuras Avaliani, 57, of the Kuzbass regional strike committee.

The strike soon spread to nine other cities in the Kuzbass. Grimy miners complained that when they came up after six hours underground, they could not find a bar of soap to wash with; the ration is one bar every two months. "Who can tell us what to feed our husbands?" shouted a woman protesting empty shelves in the stores. Many called for complete independence from central planning, insisting the miners could run things themselves.

Moscow quickly dispatched a high-level delegation to meet the strikers, led by Politburo Member Nikolai Slyunkov. Mikhail Shchadov, the minister in charge of coal mines, had earlier told the workers that they were not prepared for the independence they were demanding. But after negotiating with local strike leaders into the early hours of the morning, the Moscow delegation finally agreed to sign a protocol promising that the region's mines could decide on their production levels and investments. The state would raise miners' pay for night shifts by $50 a month, a 40% increase, improve food supplies and spend more of the mines' profits on local housing. Slyunkov also promised to increase supplies of food and soap.

Sensing victory, the Mezhdurechensk miners went back to work, but the strikes were just beginning elsewhere in the Kuzbass and the Ukraine as workers pressed for assurance they would share in the government concessions. At week's end the strike in Kazakhstan was winding down, but workers in the Donbass still held out over pension questions, prompting a government pledge that all the issues would be considered without delay.

Strikes are not technically illegal in the Soviet Union; the Marxist tenet that they are unnecessary in a proletarian paradise has not kept them from happening. Until the Gorbachev era, Communist rulers used bullets or gifts of consumer goods to quell unruly workers. But under the impact of perestroika and glasnost, work stoppages have become part of the economic landscape.

As he pushes ahead with reform, Gorbachev is having to contend not just with strikes but also with constitutional revolt in the independence-minded Baltic states and a wave of ethnic violence in the Caucasus and central Asia. Only < last week bloody rioting that left 20 dead erupted between minority Abkhazians and the Georgian majority in a Black Sea region of western Georgia. Some 3,000 Interior Ministry troops were dispatched to help local police quiet the unrest. But the audacious mining walkout has presented Gorbachev with the most serious labor challenge he has had to face, and casts in graphic terms the cruel dilemma of perestroika: how to raise productivity and living standards at the same time.

Gorbachev appears to be attempting to turn the strike wave into a deeper popular commitment to his aims. While he sounded a warning that labor unrest "could damage everything we are doing," he spoke almost admiringly of how the strikers were behaving "in a responsible, organized and disciplined fashion."

In fact, it would be difficult for Gorbachev to oppose the workers' calls for greater independence from the dead hand of Moscow ministries. That is a central ingredient in his plans to revitalize the Soviet economy by encouraging local initiative. But to be effective, the idea of self-reliance and experimentation had to evolve into more than just a prescription issued from the Kremlin. Gorbachev can take satisfaction and possibly draw some political strength from the evidence in Kuzbass and Donbass that workers may be stirring from the "stagnation" of the Leonid Brezhnev years. The daily Sovetskaya Rossiya put it succinctly: "Perestroika, which has until recently been a 'revolution from above,' is getting strong support from below."

Yet no matter how pleased Gorbachev may be to see a political awakening among the indifferent Soviet citizens, he must recognize that some of their economic demands are potentially threatening. In addition to their attacks on the bureaucracy, the strikers are demanding better food and housing and more consumer goods. The government has responded by flying in tons of supplies as a palliative, setting a costly and hazardous precedent. Most of the Soviet population eats poorly and lives in inferior housing. If workers everywhere rise up and demand more and better, the system's stability could be endangered.

With reporting by Paul Hofheinz/Prokopevsk and John Kohan/Moscow