After six or seven years of chaos, the working class had had enough. They were looking for immediate solutions to their most pressing problems, beginning with the huge wage arrears that had built up. The drastic falls in living standards and the constant provocations against the masses had now reached a critical point. The indignation of the masses had boiled over. The outrage of the workers was expressed in a militant movement of the miners and other sectors.
On 11 June 1998 miners from throughout Russia set up a picket outside the White House. It was not only the miners, but also many other sections that were moving into struggle. This posed an extreme danger to the regime.
The Economist of 22 August 1998 described the scenes:
Outside parliament trade unions are demanding that their unpaid wages around 78 billion roubles ($10 billion at the new exchange rate) should be adjusted to compensate for the 20% devaluation seen this week. They have called a strike for October 7th. Labour protests, although disruptive, have not yet crystallised into national strikes, but will become more virulent if the economy slumps.
The following extracts from material published by the miners’ union gives us a clear indication that the period of working class ‘passivity’ was over.
Train carriages from Russia’s Far North descended on Moscow on June 11 carrying 150 disgruntled coal miners who made the 40-hour journey to the capital to stage a protest against wage arrears. They came to Moscow with the support of all of Vorkuta, teachers, doctors, pensioners, all contributed whatever they could to the funds to pay for the miners’ travel.
They remain there now. They came prepared for a long vigil. At a press conference, leaders of the trade unions said that the action would last as long as the miners could hold out and that miners had come to Moscow with one-way tickets and that for the time being they didn’t have the money for their return fares!
This time the miners came with political demands as well as demands for unpaid wages. Their demands were made clear by the posters the pickets held, reading: “Down with the President!”; “Yeltsin, give our money back!” and “Yeltsin, we brought you up, we will bring you down!”
But apart from the payment of their wages, “virtually all Russian miners” are now demanding “the resignation of the president and the holding of early presidential elections” in the words of Aleksandr Sergeev, the President of the union.
The miners of Vorkuta were quickly joined by up to 400 others from the Kuznetsk coalfield, and Rostov Region. Others have joined the protest at various times including miners from Sakhalin Island, Chelyabinsk, the Urals, Norilsk, Kemerovo, Tula and Rostov. A small contingent of nine workers representing the giant AvtoVAZ car-maker in Togliatti joined the protest. Protesting scientists, students and Moscow metro workers also have joined the protest at various times.
Although they are largely being ignored by the government, the demonstrators are certainly not being ignored by the rest of the city, the protesters have been accepting offers from city factories and sympathetic residents, many of whom regularly deliver food and support to the picket.
The miners’ picket outside the White House was not an isolated incident, as reports from other areas showed:
On the morning of 31st July, practically the entire adult population of Partizansk [known as the mining capital of the Maritime Territory in the Russian Far East] and the miners’ satellite townships attended meetings near the Avangard and Uglekamenskaya pits and took a unanimous decision to adopt political demands, including calls for the resignation of President Boris Yeltsin and the Cabinet of Ministers.
In the town itself, there are frequent rallies involving almost all the population. Wives of the coal miners recently said if wages remain unpaid, they will hold a ‘women’s rebellion’. The situation becomes more explosive by the day. Coal miners say that they no longer believe promises. Reports say that most families do not even have basic foodstuffs. In unison with their wives, coal miners have threatened ‘to take pitchforks and crow-bars’ to force the payment of their delayed wages.
This involvement of the women cannot be sufficiently underlined. When the women begin to get involved at this level, it is always the symptom of a deep, underlying reawakening of the whole of the working class. We must remember that the Russian Revolution began precisely with a movement of the women workers in February 1917. The miners’ picket set up its headquarters on the Gorbaty Bridge in Moscow and they published material in the bulletin of the Independent Miners’ Union. The translator of their material in the July 16th issue of the bulletin made the following comment:
I believe these materials give a fairly true picture of the present ferment within the nascent labour movement of Russia. Personally, I am specially fascinated by the resurgence of the tradition of Russian plebeian democracy and grass-roots activism, reminiscent of 1905 and 1917, which seemed to have been long lost.
He reported the speech made by Vyacheslav Revuzov, “the head of a delegation from the city of Tula, the home of the Kalashnikov machine gun and a traditional centre of arms production.”
When Vyacheslav Revuzov was asked the question: “You have women among them. Does it make it more difficult?” His reply was:
On the contrary, you have no idea what kind of women they are. Some of them I would not exchange for any man. One of these women is Yevmenenko. She is the chairwoman of the strike committee of the military plant ‘Shtamp’. I would go on any dangerous mission with her. They could not find a single man to lead the labour movement there. So, she took the burden on herself and they have accomplished a lot: fired one director, appointed another. De facto, they completely control the plant which presently has about three thousand workers. They summon to the committee their chief engineer, the mechanic, the energy manager and ask them: why has production stalled? They can fire them any moment and appoint other specialists. This is what workers’ power in an enterprise is all about.