Russia’s gathering storm

THE "WORST ordeal to befall our country in all the four years of restructuring." That was how USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev described the wave of miners' strikes in Siberia and Ukraine that ended last month. The strikes were in fact a massive, spontaneous display of working-class strength and creativity.

The movement followed the pattern described by Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg in her classic study, The Mass Strike. It began as a local strike over limited demands and spread to involve hundreds of thousands of workers in four coalfields, thousands of miles apart. As it spread, the strike wave raised more than economic questions.

It became a political factor of immense importance for the whole of Russia. The Donbass miners in Ukraine, who did not join in the movement until after the first week, felt so strong that they would not return to work until Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov had met their strike committee.

Even then, they refused to budge from the main square in the town of Donetsk until the strike committee returned from Moscow with Ryzhkov's and Gorbachev's signatures on a written agreement.

The movement became increasingly radical as it gathered momentum. In the first days of the strike, strike committees were elected which contained many moderates, including officials of the state-run unions and sections of local management. But it was not long before mass meetings were refusing to abide by calls from these people for a return to work. Boris Kagarlitsky. a leading socialist in the radical Moscow Popular Front, sat in on meetings of a strike committee in Karaganda. He told Socialist Worker:

It's the first stage of the movement, and it is still economic. But the strike committees elected at the beginning already don't reflect the state of mind of the miners. There was a lot of resistance by the workers against the attempts of the strike committees to move them back to work. It is a model which you will know quite well from your own trade union movement, reproduced here in the space of three or four days.

With the growing radicalization, strikers raised demands that weren't concerned only with what happened in individual pits, but with the whole situation of the mining communities. The strikers took up issues like food supplies, pollution and child care. A minority began to go beyond economic demands to raise openly political ones.

For instance, the Chervonohrad miners in Ukraine called for immediate elections to the local city council and the firing of the local police and KGB chiefs, the editor of the local newspaper and three judges. They demanded the right to form an independent union "to be called Solidarity" and the removal of the Ukrainian party boss, Politburo member Shcherbitsky.

"In some cases," said Kagarlitsky, "there was already a real struggle between the strike committees and the masses which wanted to continue the strike and to have more radical demands--to politicize the demands and so on.

"In Karaganda, there were elements of support for the idea of a new socialist party among the workers. You can't say that was the mood of the masses, but a few people were very enthusiastic about the idea."

THE STRIKES broke at a time when there was already a growing sense of desperation within the ruling circles of the regime.

It was evident at a July 18 conference of the ruling party's Central Committee, the body which brings together several hundred key figures from the USSR's establishment. "Many party committees are losing control of the situation," warned Moscow party boss and Politburo member Zaikov.

A local party leader from Uzbekistan spoke "about the most alarming shortage--the shortage of trust among the people." Ryzhkov said "negative phenomena are growing increasingly" within the party itself. "We have begun to lose our influence and our control of the situation," he said. "Things are reaching the point where the party is relegated to the backseat in public life."

Ryzhkov was among a number of speakers who warned that "informal organizations"--political bodies opposed to the ruling party, like Kagarlitsky's Popular Front--were increasingly influential.

"All sorts of scum has risen to the surface," Ryzhkov said. "It is harmful, and we are not reacting against it. We are giving tacit consent to democratic unions (and) dubious rallies. Informal organizations literally forced their way to the rostrum of the Congress of Deputies with their platforms, program, proposals and accusations."

Most comment about the conference in the Western press emphasized the open voicing of differences, seeing the event as a fight between Gorbachev and his political rivals.

It is true that Ryzhkov made veiled criticisms of both Gorbachev and the leading conservative on the politburo, Yegor Ligachev, while Ligachev made veiled criticisms of Gorbachev. It is also true that Gorbachev was more inclined to talk of trying to regain control of the movement by making concessions to it, while Ligachev stressed the need for "discipline."

But what united the three was still greater than what divided them. All saw things in terms of how the existing power structure could retain its grip. It was Gorbachev who warned of "the influence of radical, left-wing sentiments," saying that "populist ideas and leftist speculations on the demands for social justice in a spirit of universal leveling have gained wide currency."

In a speech to the Supreme Soviet, he made barely disguised threats that troops might eventually be used against the strikers. "The country could find itself in a situation when we have to think which forms to use so that the situations shouldn't run away from us."

But even Ligachev, usually seen as the leading conservative in the Politburo, understood that to use force against the strikes would be to risk an enormous explosion of discontent. So the methods which Gorbachev claims he prefers--those of conciliation rather than coercion--were used, and the leadership agreed in the end to talk to the strike committees and give in to the immediate economic demands of all the miners.

THAT WILL not, however, be the end of the matter. By giving in to all their demands, the bureaucracy only increased the miners' confidence to strike again if the concessions aren't forthcoming.

And the concessions can only encourage other groups of workers to press their case even harder. Already last month, there was talk of Gorbachev's worst nightmare coming true--a strike on the railroads that could shut down the entire country in a matter of days.

As for further concessions, the bureaucracy has almost no room to maneuver. As part of the settlement with the miners, Gorbachev promised an extra 10 billion rubles would be set aside for the import of consumer goods.

Nobody knows where this money will come from. Ryzhkov last month reported the government would have to borrow more just to service its $40 billion debt to the West. Meanwhile, the state budget deficit has swelled to close to 100 billion rubles.

The scale of the crisis can't be overestimated. In commenting on Gorbachev's overture to the Group of Seven economic summit in Paris two months ago, the Financial Times commented that "the G7 could have a role to play in the Soviet Union. Without a concerted international response to the ills of the Soviet economy, the country could become a chronic source of in instability for the rest of the world community, as the Soviet empire starts to fall apart."

Gorbachev's solutions sound increasingly pathetic. At the Central Committee conference, all he could offer as a way forward was for party officials to work better. "The problems confronting the party," he said, "all come down to cadres...There is a need for a renewal of cadres," he said, in an unwitting repetition of Stalin's old slogan "cadres are everything."

Gorbachev's behavior increasingly resembles Nikita Khrushchev's during his last years in power. He might seem like a towering figure on the world stage, but he is losing his balance at home as he switches from one option to another in a desperate attempt to get his reforms to work.

This does not mean that Gorbachev's overthrow is imminent. But it does mean that over the coming months the pressure will grow within the bureaucracy as a whole--from many of its younger "reformers" as well as the old Brezhnevites--to use the forces of the state to take back the concessions made to the workers and the movements of the national minorities.

Gorbachev will face the choice of either heading such a return to repression or getting out of the way.

KAGARLITSKV SAYS that the sense of crisis inside the USSR is now on the scale of that in Poland in 1980-81, with each social group seeing no way to solve its immediate problems other than through confrontation.

But he also points out that, despite the success of the recent strikes, the workers' movement still has not built an enduring organization like Solidarnosc. "Sometimes people are for the independent unions," Kagarlitsky said. "But we on the democratic left have a lot of work to do. So don't have any premature expectations--avoid any enthusiastic idealism."

Indeed, the Russian workers' movement is really at the stage it reached in Poland in the winter of 1970-71, when it forced the party leader Gierek to come to the shipyards to negotiate, but could not develop an independent trade union structure capable of resisting the victimization of militants in the crackdown that followed.

In the struggle ahead, Russia's workers can begin to build such an organization. If they do, they can begin to present their own alternative to the choices the bureaucracy poses-either a return to an inefficient, bureaucratically centralized economy or the establishment of an equally inefficient market economy. They can begin to fight for a democratically planned economy that operates to satisfy their own needs.

The miners' strikes mark a new stage in the history of the USSR--a stage that can only end with an advance toward real workers' control of society or a retreat back into repression.

First published in the September 1989 edition of Socialist Worker.