By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Workers in one of Russia's main industrial regions are organising themselves for a day of coordinated protest action, in what could be a landmark development for the rise of a broad, militant labour opposition to the country's rulers.
At a meeting on May 19, trade union leaders in Kemerovo province in western Siberia set June 11 as the date for strikes, pickets and demonstrations aimed at forcing the Russian government to pay wages and revive the region's economy. With a population of 3 million, Kemerovo includes the Kuzbass mining district that produces more than 30% of Russia's coal, and which is also home to large metallurgical and engineering plants.
The decision to move to coordinated protests was taken as labour struggles were already exploding in many Kuzbass cities. As the Moscow daily Trud reported, the latest wave of actions began when around 15,000 miners, construction workers, medical staff, teachers and pensioners attended a May 19 rally on the central square of Anzhero-Sudzhensk, in the north of Kemerovo province.
Helping spur the workers to action was a planned railway merger that is to cost 5000 jobs.
"An appeal was adopted to all inhabitants of the Kuzbass to switch from local protest actions to a general strike", Trud reported. "A permanently operating city strike committee was elected for the purpose. Point one in the unanimously adopted resolution was a demand for the resignation of the president and government."
The workers threatened that if their demands were not met, they would again block traffic on the trans-Siberian railway, which passes through Anzhero-Sudzhensk. After blocking the tracks for 16 hours on April 9, local miners won the payment of two months' wages.
In the nearby city of Yurga, health workers on May 20 began an indefinite strike, providing only emergency care. They had not been paid for as long as eight months. The number of Kuzbass medical establishments taking part in protest actions over the past three months, a television report on the strike stated, was the same as for the whole of last year.
In the city of Belovo, teachers at nine schools were reported on May 22 to be on strike. On June 2 some 1500 teachers from throughout the Kuzbass demonstrated on the main square of the provincial capital, Kemerovo. Many teachers in the province still have not received all their pay for 1996.
On paper, workers in the Kuzbass are relatively prosperous, with average wages well above the Russian mean. But as the Moscow daily Segodnya noted on May 22, there is almost no sector of the economy in Kemerovo province where wage bills are reliably met.
According to Segodnya, the wages and pensions payment crisis in the province is the most severe in Russia. The largest enterprise in the Kuzbass, the West Siberian Metallurgical Combine in Novokuznetsk, still owes its 30,000 workers their pay from six months back.
In an extreme case, production continues at a glass factory in Anzhero-Sudzhensk even though workers there have not been paid for three and a half years.
Investment and output in most of the province's industries continue to decline, and the slide is being accelerated by coal industry "restructuring" — meaning pit closures. Of 13 mines in the coal centre of Prokopyevsk in the southern Kuzbass, nine are slated to be "restructured".
The coal industry holding company Rosugol has a policy of closing mines that are worked at depths of more than 500-600 metres. But in Prokopyevsk none of the mines are deeper than 250 metres. Miners are angered that reserves of high-quality coking coal sufficient for hundreds of years will be lost for good once the pits are abandoned.
Industrial decay is nothing unusual for present-day Russia. What is exceptional about the Kuzbass has been the resoluteness of the labour response. Traditions of workers' struggle are strong in the region, which in 1989 was the centre of the huge miners' strikes that critically weakened the Soviet regime of Mikhail Gorbachev.
The habit of self-organisation has persisted and developed, with enterprise strike committees a semi-permanent feature of the labour scene in various centres. A notable innovation was the founding in Prokopyevsk last autumn of a city-wide Committee of Salvation, dominated by trade union and workers' committee representatives.
Meanwhile, the political evolution of the Kuzbass workers has been steadily leftward. Among the firmest supporters of Boris Yeltsin at the beginning of the 1990s, the miners have since become deeply alienated from the Moscow authorities. In the presidential elections of mid-1996, Kemerovo province recorded a majority for Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov.
In part, the disillusionment with nomenklatura-capitalist "democrats" reflects a scandalous lack of democracy in the province's internal political life. Since 1991, the governor of the province — appointed by Yeltsin — has been former mining engineer Mikhail Kislyuk.
With the holding of regional elections in most of Russia over the past year, Kislyuk is now the only regional chief executive who has not faced the voters. An unpopular figure, he is trying to prolong his hold on office by refusing to sign an electoral law, approved by the provincial legislature, that would reduce the required minimum turnout in a gubernatorial election to 25% from the difficult-to-achieve level of 50%.
Where the political system has failed to supply democracy, the Kuzbass workers are quite prepared to take it for themselves. In Anzhero-Sudzhensk on May 19, a permanently operating city strike committee was elected, and charged with organising a general strike.
On May 22 Segodnya reported that a Committee for the Salvation of the Kuzbass had been formed, led by the chairperson of the provincial committee of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia, Anatoly Chekis.
As organising for the June 11 protests gathered pace, the rhetoric of workers' leaders was strongly anti-government and anti-Yeltsin. Chekis was quoted by Segodnya on May 22 as saying that the coming struggles should be aimed not against employers and local authorities, but against the government and president of Russia.
The newspaper went on to state: "The trade unions and the provincial administration are agreed as to who is responsible for the region's crisis".
It is hard to dispute that the key reasons for the woes of the Kuzbass lie in the policies of Moscow. But if a bloc with local administrators and enterprise managers to demand changes to these policies is not to turn into a trap for the labour movement, it needs to be handled with great care.
The dangers are suggested by the fact that the Kuzbass leaders issuing statements critical of Moscow now include Kislyuk.
There are no guarantees that the trade union leaders in the Kuzbass have either the will or the tactical insights to avoid being coopted by forces that have no real brief to defend workers' interests.
However, rank and file union members are clearly less forgiving than their leaders where the provincial administration is concerned. At the mass meeting in Anzhero- Sudzhensk on May 19, the protesters demanded Kislyuk's dismissal.