By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — The last hopes held by Russian coal miners in the regime of President Boris Yeltsin, historians may yet decide, expired on August 11 in a potato field south of the Ural Mountains city of Chelyabinsk.
That was where some 100 miners from three Chelyabinsk pits, intent on blocking a rail line, found their way barred by as many as 2000 club-toting police and riot troops.
Up to this point, some doubt had remained whether the government would use force to break blockades placed on rail lines by unpaid workers.
A sense of shame at the misery created by government policies, it still seemed, might lead Yeltsin and his ministers to make concessions rather than take up the cudgels. Or even if the government were quite shameless, it might still be wary of taking on the best-organised sector of the work force in a physical confrontation.
By the end of August 11, all such illusions had been destroyed. The same day, police arrested Alexander Sergeyev, chairperson of the Independent Union of Miners (NPG), Russia's second largest coal union, and interrogated him for two hours.
On August 12, Interior Ministry agents turned up at the Moscow headquarters of the NPG and demanded to be let in. Admitted only after they threatened to force their way inside, they spent several hours examining union documents.
Finally, they seized more than 20 documents, including decisions of the union's council and copies of appeals and declarations by NPG officials and militants.
Meanwhile, government officials were making clear that in future, the political arena would be out of bounds to labour movement organisations.
"We have to make a strict division between the activities of trade unions and political parties", justice minister Pavel Krashennikov told a news conference on August 12. "We will have to look again at the law, clarify the registration system and clearly outline the trade unions' sphere of influence."
Political parties were warned off trying to put their messages to organised labour. "If we do not set clear limits", Krashennikov was quoted as saying, "some political parties will try to align themselves with trade unions in order to exert their political influence on enterprise workers".
Criminal prosecutions
In earlier months, unionists had been inclined to discount threats by government officials that criminal prosecutions would be launched against militants who took part in actions such as rail blockades. But by mid-August, legal reprisals were becoming a reality.
The Moscow daily Segodnya reported on August 11 that in the Kuzbass industrial region of Siberia, the scene of extended rail blockades in May and July, a total of eight criminal cases had been filed. According to Moscow News on August 13, charges had also been laid against blockaders in Chelyabinsk province.
The task of identifying labour militants and preparing cases against them is not being left to overworked, under-funded local prosecutors. The newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets reported on August 13 that the director of the Federal Security Service — the main successor organisation to the KGB — had ordered his officers to collect information with a view to bringing criminal charges against striking miners.
With the country's finances dissolving, it may seem astonishing that Russia's leaders have decided to add a crackdown on the labour movement to their existing travails. But this year, labour struggles have not gone into their customary summer lull.
Civil disobedience
Especially among workers in the coal industry, where wage arrears often stretch back for many months, tactics such as hunger strikes have been replaced by mass acts of civil disobedience.
By blockading the Trans-Siberian Railway during May and July, miners in the Kuzbass caused the government major economic losses. The blockades were lifted after the government sent money to allow partial payment of back wages.
On the oil-rich island of Sakhalin in the Russian far east, unpaid miners on July 24 blocked a rail line leading to the island's coal-fired power station. Power supplies were cut to as little as four hours per day. Despite threats from local authorities that police would be used to break the blockade, the miners maintained it until August 6.
In Chelyabinsk the Trans-Siberian railway was blocked for three weeks from late July, after miners had received only a third of the back wages promised in an earlier agreement. Negotiations resulted in a compromise, under which the miners agreed conditionally to lift the blockade after the local authorities undertook to pay an additional 25 million roubles (about US$4 million).
For the miners, this deal represented a major concession. The sum promised would fund only about a month's pay, while union officials put the average wage backlog for miners in the region at eight months.
While the Chelyabinsk blockade was still in place, miners learned that trains were evading it by using a line some 30 kilometres to the south. On August 11 a contingent of miners set off in buses to close the detour. Waiting for them was a human chain of federal troops and police, standing with their arms linked on each side of the railway.
Many of the troops had been brought 2000 kilometres from Moscow. By mobilising these forces, the government was signifying that even if the justice of workers' claims was undeniable, acts of protest that were more than symbolic would likely be met with repression.
Deflecting blame
The efforts by government supporters to justify this new, tough line have been awkward and contradictory. Citing the need to observe the rule of law has simply drawn attention to the fact that if blocking railway tracks is a crime, so is failing to pay workers their wages.
As in the past, the government and its apologists have tried to deflect the blame for the miners' plight. First deputy premier Boris Nemtsov claims that the state is meeting its budget undertakings to the coal industry almost in full, and government supporters often maintain that if miners are not being paid, the protests should be directed elsewhere — above all, against the managers of mining firms. This argument is disingenuous.
For a start, the coal industry is still mainly state-owned. The government makes little effort to supervise the state holding companies that administer the mines, but this does not absolve the Kremlin authorities of responsibility for ensuring that wages are paid.
Also, Russia's government for years aided and abetted the non-payment of miners' wages by tolerating scandalous corruption by coal industry managers.
Interior Ministry investigative teams have now been dispatched to the main mining regions, and reports indicate that more than 140 coal sector managers and coal traders have been placed under investigation. At least 34 cases have been handed over to the courts.
But before anyone starts cheering, it should be noted that the authorities have started seriously investigating the rip-offs only since miners began sitting on railway lines.
The turn to using riot troops and court prosecutions to quell miners' protests is especially ironic considering the political role which the Russian miners' movement played for a lengthy period from the late 1980s. Huge strikes by miners in 1989 and again in 1991 helped to weaken the Soviet regime of Mikhail Gorbachev, and to prepare the way for the dissolution of the USSR.
Bitterly hostile to the Communist Party, miners for the most part threw their weight behind Yeltsin, providing him with useful political cover throughout the early 1990s.
As late as 1993, Kuzbass miners offered to come to Moscow to aid Yeltsin in the showdown he was engineering with the parliament of the time. Alexander Sergeyev's NPG was for years closely aligned with the Yeltsin regime, with Sergeyev himself serving as a presidential adviser.
This support was a fundamental error. When Yeltsin and the layers of the former Soviet elite for whom he acted set out to restore capitalism in Russia, they were not doing so with a view to defending workers' rights. The only "right" they were really committed to was that of entrepreneurs to enrich themselves.
Even if the "entrepreneurship" was no better than theft, the authorities routinely tolerated it on the basis that capital was being accumulated and a new class of owners of capital was rising up. There are few better illustrations of this than the complacency shown by the Yeltsin regime toward abuses in the coal industry.
Brutal experience has destroyed the illusions held by miners in Yeltsin and his ministers — and to an increasing extent, miners' illusions in the system of social relations that Yeltsin has set out to install. The miners are beginning to act as something that has arisen repeatedly in the history of western capitalism — a current of class-conscious militants within the labour movement.
The Yeltsin regime is responding in classical fashion for a capitalist government confronting such an opposition — with investigations by secret police, arrests of union officials, prosecution of activists, mobilisations of riot troops and new laws to restrict the political rights of the workers.
Russia's neo-liberal ideologues should perhaps rejoice. Their society is taking on more of the features of normal capitalism.