CHAPTER 7
The Soviet Union's once docile working class is passive no longer: 1989 saw the outbreak of organised worker protest on a scale not experienced in the USSR since the 1920s. Strikes -- once said to be an impossibility under socialism -- are now commonplace. Unofficial workers' clubs, workers' fronts, and embryonic free trade unions are springing up all over the country. These show a marked polarisation: some are oriented towards reform; others are openly conservative; many are ethnically based.
According to Sergei Stankevich -- one of the most radical members of the Soviet parliament -- Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of perestroika is entering a new phase in the 1990s. (1) During Gorbachev's first five years in power, Stankevich argues, economic reform was put on the back burner while the Soviet leader concentrated on political reforms designed to win him popular support. Political reform went down well with the intelligentsia, but, now that economic reform can no longer be postponed, Gorbachev will be forced to adopt a number of policies that are likely to be extremely unpopular with many members of the working class.
Gorbachev's dilemma is that he needs popular support for unpopular policies. The success or failure of his economic reforms will depend on whether he is able to motivate the Soviet population to work conscientiously and think creatively. While a successful market reform cannot be realised without the active participation of a significant proportion of the population, there will, as with any major reform, be losers as well as winners. In the transition period, which could last several years, there may even be more losers than winners. Those who stand to suffer are semi-skilled and unskilled workers unable to find in themselves latent business talents. Non-working pensioners, workers too old to learn new skills, and those whose family commitments make it difficult for them to move in search of fresh employment are likely to be hit especially hard. Many Soviet workers are profoundly alarmed at the changes they have been told are in store for them.
The struggle between the supporters and opponents of change is therefore developing into a tug of war for the allegiance of the working population. Conservative forces in the Communist Party, official trade unions, and ministerial bureaucracies -- whose cosy jobs and privileges are threatened by Gorbachev's policies -- are appealing for working-class support to block political and economic change. They are abetted in this by the anger felt by many members of the population at Gorbachev's failure to improve their material conditions.
Working-class protest erupted in July 1989, when a wave of strikes swept through the USSR's coal-mining regions and close on half a million workers downed tools. Within a few months, strikes became an accepted instrument for resolving labour disputes. On 1 September, the government newspaper Izvestia called strikes "the most popular form of communication with the authorities".
According to Soviet officials, the time lost as a result of strikes in the first six months of 1989 amounted to two million man-days; nationally, that is, an average of 15,000 workers were on strike each day. Losses for the following five months (July-November 1989 -- a period that saw both the miners' strikes and a subsequent wave of ethnic protests) amounted to 5.5 million made-days -- that is, an average of nearly 50,000 workers on strike each day. (2)
Workers' protests grew so common that the authorities found themselves obliged in the fall of 1989 to move quickly to legalise strikes for the first time and to do so with a great many restrictions. Innovative though this measure was for the USSR, it was clear that the authorities were driven to take the step by their desire to regulate a phenomenon with an independent existence already outside their control. (3)
Informal workers' groups and clubs have sprung up all over the country. Considerable interest was aroused in October 1989, when a group of more than 200 army officers met in Moscow to found the first independent trade union of the Soviet armed forces. The new organisation pledged to concern itself with the welfare of servicemen and their families. (4) Indeed, there are now so many workers' groups that it is impossible to keep track of them all. However, it is not yet clear in which direction the workers' movement will develop. At this stage, many of the new organisations are intent on trying to work within the existing Soviet system, rather than following the example of Poland's "Solidarity" and setting up independent workers' organisations.
The nationalities issue overshadows all others in the USSR today. No sooner did Moscow recognise the right to strike than the strike weapon was "hijacked" for use less in defence of traditional "worker" interests than as a means of applying pressure in inter-ethnic conflicts. Highly effective use was made of this weapon in fall 1989, when recently formed "international fronts" (variously styled Interdivizhenie or Interfront) of mainly Russian workers staged massive strikes in the Baltic republics and Moldavia in protest against proposed language and citizenship laws. Major strikes were also organised to protest ethnic grievances in the Caucasian republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
The international fronts are Russian nationalist and anti-reform in tendency (that is, they support central control and direction by Moscow). Meanwhile, popular fronts in the Baltic republics and Moldavia have tried to organise their own workers' movements; by and large, these tend to attract members of the indigenous nationality. Thus, polarisation of the working class is taking place along both national and reform lines, though the divisions are not tidy. There are believed to be not inconsiderable numbers of ethnic Russian workers in the Baltic republics who support the indigenous movements rather than the international fronts.
Following the crushing defeat of many official candidates in the general elections in spring 1989, disgruntled Party and trade union officials began to mobilise worker support against economic and political reform. Leningrad, the Soviet Union's second city, emerged as the centre of the opposition movement. Although the city boasts the largest popular front in the USSR, with over a million members, it is also the cradle of the United Front of Workers (UFW) -- a conservative, Russian nationalist organisation that held its constituent congress in Leningrad in June 1989. (5) The UFW grew swiftly, clearly enjoying the patronage of the Leningrad Party organisation, the majority of whose top-ranking officials had been defeated in the spring elections. By the end of 1989, the UFW claimed 350,000 members in Leningrad alone, (6) and other sister organisations had been established in other Russian cities. (7)
The UFW pitched its campaign at the working class, which, it is argued, was being robbed of the privileged status in Soviet society it supposedly enjoyed in the past. In particular, the UFW pointed to the sharp drop in worker representation in the Congress of People's Deputies elected in multi-candidate balloting in the spring elections (previously, of course, candidates were selected by quota from above). The UFW called for elections to be held on a new basis: not only should a set of percentage of places be reserved for working-class representatives in the Soviet parliament but elections to local soviets should be conducted on "production" instead of "territorial" lines -- that is, candidates should be nominated and run for election in their enterprises. Reformers alleged that conservative Party and trade-union officials hoped in this way to retain the control they had traditionally exercised over the selection of candidates for public office.
The UFW has the support of the official Soviet trade unions, which have responded to charges of passivity during the miners' strikes by throwing their weight against Gorbachev's market-oriented reforms. Declaring their determination to "defend the legitimate rights and interests of the working people", the official trade unions appealed, to the government in September, 1989, for a freeze on food prices and a halt to "profiteering" by co-operatives. (8)
The international fronts and the United Front of Workers are linked to one another and also to other -- predominantly Russian nationalist -- groups through an umbrella organisation, the United Council of Russia. The founding conference of this extremely conservative body was held in Moscow in September 1989. (9) Among its declared aims are "real economic independence" for the RSFSR, including "stopping the barbarian pillaging of the natural wealth of Russia and its transformation into a raw material appendage and waste dump for developed Capitalist countries". In a clear statement of opposition to Gorbachev's policies, the council has spoken out against "the forms of exploitation being restored", describing these as "blind imitation of the market experience of capitalism" that threatens the Soviet Union with "impoverishment" and "enslavement". (10)
How much real support among workers do the conservative movements have? Reformers say they lack a social base and represent no more than an attempt by diehard officials to cling to power. Yet the strikes they organised in the summer and fall of 1989 were remarkably successful in forcing republican authorities to suspend controversial language and citizenship laws. The influence of the conservatives was surely detectable, too, in the extremely cautious character of the economic reform package adopted by the central authorities in fall, 1989, which included further postponement of retail-price reform.
Gorbachev's political reforms have given Soviet workers a voice, and in 1989 they showed they were determined to use it. The danger now is that political reform may have moved so far ahead of economic reform that it will be difficult for Moscow to implement the painful but long overdue changes that need to be made in the economy. The role of the working class will be vital over the coming period.
ENDNOTES
1. Komsomol'skava pravda, 13 October 1989.
2. Izvestia, 14 December 1989.
3. For the text of the new law, see Pravda, 14 October 1989. Though a step forward in the Soviet context, it is a restrictive piece of legislation, outlawing wildcat strikes and permitting industrial action only after two separate conciliation bodies have failed to resolve the conflict. Strikes may be suspended for up to two months by order of the USSR Supreme Soviet or the Supreme Soviet of one of the USSR's fifteen Union republics. They are banned entirely where this would create "a threat to people's life and health" as well as in the transport, energy, communications, and defense sectors.
4. New York Times, 22 October 1989; Washington Post, 22 October 1989; Izvestia, 25 October 1989.
5. Leningradskaya pravda, 8 June 1989.
6. Izvestia, 8 December 1989.
7. Anatolii Salutsky, "Ural'skoe protivostoyanie", Literaturnaya rossiya, 6 & 13 October 1989; Vera Tolz, "The United Front of Workers of Russia: Further Consolidation of Antireform Forces", Report on the USSR, 39, 1989, pages 11-13.
8. Trud, 9 September 1989.
9. Tolz, op. cit.
10. Politicheskoe obrazovanie, 17, 1989, pages 63-65.
No comments:
Post a Comment