By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Part of the Russian "soul", western tradition holds, is a unique bent for passive suffering. Centuries of peasant revolts, not to speak of other convulsions, give the lie to this myth. Nevertheless, it still gets trotted out by commentators who note with relief the ability of the current Russian government to force neo-liberal measures on the population and remain in office.
In reality, the response of Russians to "reform" has been far from passive. Just how far was illustrated in the last days of January when a protest picket in a Siberian coal town erupted into a four-day siege during which a hated mine director was held captive. The episode ended only when riot police arrested the director.
As related by the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, on January 27 workers from the Kuznetskaya mine, near the city of Polysaevo in the Kuzbass coal region, gathered outside the mine administration building. They were demanding unpaid wages from as far back as mid-1995.
The fact that such a protest took place is an irony in itself. With large reserves of high-quality coking coal, the Kuznetskaya mine was the first in Russia to be privatised, in 1991. The workers and managers kept a 40% stake. The bulk of the shares were purchased by an Austrian firm and another registered in Liechtenstein. In return for shares at a barely nominal price, the new majority stakeholders promised to invest in modern equipment.
Favoured by the new owners with gifts such as television sets, many of the workers felt their fortunes could only improve. Instead, output in the mine plunged and wages stopped. The miners remained in their decrepit villages — in recent times without running water — living on what they could grow in garden plots, gifts from relatives and occasional payments in kind from their employer.
With the miners' support, local authorities sought to have the mine re-nationalised. Last year, an arbitration court ruled the privatisation illegal, reversed it and ordered mine director Aleksandr Ternovykh dismissed. This finding, however, was later overturned on appeal.
The wage debts continued to mount and by January the mine owed individual workers sums ranging from 10,000 to 45,000 roubles (US$1600-$7400). The miners' demands now included re-nationalisation of the mine, criminal charges against Ternovykh and a federal investigation into the reasons why the local prosecutor's office had not already pressed charges against him.
During the January 27 picket, Nezavisimaya Gazeta related, Ternovykh showed up unexpectedly at the mine administration building. He began a meeting with managerial and technical personnel. When the picketers demanded the mine director meet with them, local news services reported, he declared: "I'm not going to talk to this riff-raff without a gun in my hands".
Some 50 miners then blockaded him in a conference room. More than 20 managers and technicians were told they could leave, but most chose to stay. Ternovykh, the miners made clear, would be released only into the custody of criminal investigators.
Police surrounded the building, but did not intervene. The local mayor, no doubt sensing that the blockade was highly popular, told journalists that the city authorities were refusing to become involved.
If their demands were not met, the blockaders declared, they would halt traffic on a busy nearby highway. On January 31, a detachment of paramilitary police arrived, and as the crowd in front of the building cheered and clapped, Ternovykh was led off to detention.
The mine director was formally charged with endangering the lives of workers. Last March, a fire in the Kuznetskaya pit took the lives of three miners. Ternovykh is reportedly being investigated on two further charges: tax evasion and abusing his position.
But early in February, authorities in Kemerovo Province, which includes the Kuzbass, launched another criminal investigation with the aim of identifying and charging the people responsible for the blockade. The charges that could be brought carry a prison sentence of three to five years.
From the mine's foreign shareholders, the blockade drew only a vague promise that wage arrears would be paid when the money was found. Meanwhile the Austrian part-owner, Prosystem GmbH, has revealed it wants to sell its stake. A Prosystem spokesperson stated that the company was suing Rosugol, the state firm that manages many of the Russian government's coal industry assets, for debts amounting to US$2.9 million.
The blockade at the Kuznetskaya mine has not been the only bitterly fought struggle to erupt on the Russian labour scene in recent weeks. No less significant, and in some ways even more dramatic, was the January 27 protest by workers of the Trans-Siberian Railway near Vladivostok in the Russian Far East. An estimated 2500 people, mostly unpaid coal miners but including defence industry workers, teachers, medical staff and municipal service workers, took part in the two-hour action.
On January 29, some 3500 people, mostly unpaid defence industry workers, demonstrated in President Boris Yeltsin's home city of Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains. And on February 4, coal transport workers in the northern Kuzbass were in the second day of a mass hunger strike. A reported 106 workers had joined the action, aimed at forcing bosses to pay wage arrears dating back to October 1996.