On March 31, Petr Aven, head of Russia's largest bank, Alfa, told the British Guardian that Russia needs President Vladimir Putin to come down with the iron-fist of dictatorship to suppress the workers' movement and all opposition to fast-tracking Thatcherisation of the economy.
"I am a supporter of Pinochet ... a politician who produced results for his country", said Aven. "The only way ahead is for fast liberal reforms, building public support for that path but also using totalitarian force to achieve that. Russia has no other choice."
Putin had begun to embark down this road before the March 26 election, which is widely believed to have been rigged. The context was a vigorous 18-month upsurge in worker militancy during which workers won some key strikes and occupations.
Nearly a decade of privatisation has made living conditions for most people abysmal. Millions of Russian workers have received no cash payment for months; wage arrears of a year or more are common.
People have been forced to survive by barter, begging, prostitution. AIDS has soared; tuberculosis is now epidemic. Many would starve if not for the tiny amounts of food they have been able to grow in small garden plots or window boxes. The average life expectancy, once near Western levels, is now 56.
Worker militancy
The rouble crash of 1998 halved workers' already bad living standards. The anger that had already begun to express itself in a wave of militant strikes, mass blockades of railways, etc., reached fever pitch. That autumn, many millions participated in a general strike. Workers facing mass redundancy in some towns such as Vyborg and Yasnogorsk seized their enterprises, expelling management and running production themselves.
The internal repressive apparatus was inadequate to deal with all this. In summer 1999, Yasnogorsk workers won unprecedented gains after their long militant occupation. Vyborg paper-manufacturing workers expelled armed strike-breaking militias from their mill.
When Putin became prime minister in late 1999, he immediately set about re-structuring and merging different secret services still under his command.
After elected worker-delegates from more than 400 major enterprises across the Kuzbass, the single biggest industrial area of the world, met to discuss the idea of organising widespread take-overs of factories, Putin forced through laws allowing the police and military to seal off any section or region of Russia.
Of course, these measures on their own were not sufficient, and so Putin played his ace card, launching the Chechen war. The event that triggered it, in the popular mind, the murder of 300 ordinary Russians in terrorist bombings, has since been shown to almost certainly have been the work of Putin and the Kremlin.
Last autumn, the Vyborg occupation held firm, despite a new raid in which two workers were shot. Draconian measures were taken to stop them shipping the product out of their self-managed firm and to halt supplies of essential foodstuffs coming into their town. Finally, exhausted and with their families facing starvation, they surrendered.
New forces
Some younger union leaders and militants have stepped into the forefront of these struggles. Now, a lot of union branches and left-wing groups have come together to form the Movement for a Workers Party, in close connection with the militant union, Defence (or Zaschita).
In the run-up to the presidential election, Putin moved to stamp out dissent. Antiwar protesters were arrested; Movement for a Workers Party and Zaschita activists were singled out for repression. In Kirov, Sergei Salnikov and Maksim Karpikov were victimised for distributing leaflets telling people not to vote for Putin.
In the aftermath of the election, the repression is clearly set to accelerate. On April 5, local councillor and co-chairperson of Bashkortostan Zaschita, Aleksei Rybalko, was savagely beaten by police who threw him, unconscious, out of their vehicle.
But perhaps the most devastating blow of all was Putin's decision to force through the Duma this month a new, hated Labour Code. The legislation will render unions toothless by forcing all workers to sign individual, short-term contracts, the continuation of which will be at employers' discretion. The working week will be increased to 56 hours and many workers' rights, held for decades, will be abolished or drastically reduced. Maternity leave is to be halved.
Zaschita and Oleg Shein, the Duma's sole militant deputy, have called for a mass campaign of resistance to the Labour Code. Shein argues this will be the only way to stop Putin from fulfilling Aven's wish for a Pinochet-style state.
Such a mass campaign needs our fullest solidarity, and this support should be channelled through those, like the Movement for a Workers Party and Zaschita, who have fought against the sort of ultra-nationalism and racism that Putin used with the Chechen war to derail workers' struggle.
For more details, visit the International Solidarity with Workers in Russia web site at .
BY STEVE MYERS