It looked like the beginning of a long summer of discontent. Oil workers in Siberia: and fishermen in the Far East are threatening strikes too. Kindergarten teachers in Moscow and lawyers in karelia walked off the job recently. Subway: workers in Leningrad:JoiDedi the miners’ protest last week, while: factory workers from the region suffering aftereffects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster went on strike to draw attention to their plight. The party of the proletariat has lost the workers’ trust. “A lot of workers and peasants may leave the party after the congress,” said Pavel Chernyak, a delegate from a trucking company in Kiev. “I may leave myself.”
A few safety valves have opened. The new president of the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin, has asked workers for a two- or three-year moratorium on strikes, to give his government a chance to begin turning the economy around. Some new local governments, elected in March, also enjoy genuine popular support. In Donetsk, progressives have won a comfortable majority in the city council, and they intend to speed up the transition to a market economy. “We’re a stabilizing factor,” said Boris Bronfman, an assistant to the chairman of the Donetsk city council. “People won’t hit out at their own. " Asked what he intends to do about an impending transit workers’ strike, the new mayor of Donetsk, Aleksander Mukhmadov, answered simply: “Strike with them.”
Even the sluggardly official trade unions are stirring. In Moscow, a liberal wing of the union structure has broken away as the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia; it claims 40 million members, or about half of the unionized workers in the country. The federation while careful not to encourage strikes, says it is organizing 10 days of protest this month to unite the fishermen, oil workers and coal miners of the Arctic Circle. Their colorful leaflets caricature official unions as a bear snoozing in a hammock, while a boy in an “Independent Federation” cap thrusts out a giant, vibrating alarm clock.
‘Floating away’: Labor unrest may breed instability. Many of the protests lack focus: strike committees at Donetsk’s Pravda mines categorically oppose closing the shafts, which date from before the Russian Revolution and are no longer profitable. The words “market relations” are only slowly seeping into the local lexicon. “I don’t know if I’m for or against the market, to be frank,” said miner Asesorov. “I don’t even know what it is.” “It’s as though society were not weighted down, and pieces of it are just floating away,” said Nikolai Tishenko, a local organizer of Rukh, the Ukrainian independence organization. “We have a ‘denationality’ problem: there is nothing integrating our society.” It’s a familiar refrain as authority collapses throughout the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet government didn’t resign last week, its impotence was clear. Perhaps the only obstacle to more strikes is that in the current power vacuum, there is no clear target to strike against.
