In the Years of Perestroika

...But everyone is aware that the worst is yet to come...

...The campaign against wastage, for several months on end, mobilized the whole of the press and all the trade unions...

...The delegates were not unanimous, since they varied in status according to the enterprises they represented...

...As the conflict between Gorbachev and Yeltsin hardened, many observers remarked that the workers' committees, influenced by the "democrats," had "swung 508 • DISSENT too far to the left," and that the base was not yet ready for the Yeltsin Plan...

...These questions will no doubt have to be solved by the movement of the class that had once been "the hegemonic class of developed socialism...

...There was no end of talk...

...On the one hand, it suppressed the memories of a social group regarded officially as the "ruling class," thereby accentuating its atomization and depoliticization...

...The United Front, which was formed of hundreds of organizations (particularly in the industrial centers of Central Russia) was of the opinion that "the development of a market economy must inevitably accentuate the economic crisis in which the country was plunged...

...These complaints did not lead to open conflict for a number of reasons: the constraint still exercised on the worker groups by the official trade union or political structures to which they were attached and the absence of information about what was happening elsewhere...

...From that time onward (autumn 1990), the leaders of the worker movement sided with Yeltsin against Gorbachev...

...From 1985-1986 onward, glasnost and the call for reforms led to the development of a social climate that was to transform the feelings of discontent into a well-organized protest movement, to the great surprise of the intelligentsia, long regarded as the only section of the population capable of organizing political resistance...

...In May 1990, the first pan-Russian congress of workers' organizations, held at Novokuznetsk, founded the "Labor Confederation," representing several hundred workers' committees...

...but during working hours, he is required to contribute, like all other workers, to the national wealth...

...Glasnost for the Soviet workers meant the discovery of the outside world, the way people lived abroad or in the "forbidden zone" (the title of a widely popular film that came out in 1988, showing in detail the privileges enjoyed by the nomenclatura...

...The most important point in the long run was what happened in the time between the strikes, even in those enterprises where no strikes had occurred: a "silent revolution," almost unnoticed by the media, both Soviet and Western, which concentrated either on "inter-ethnic" conflicts or the rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin...

...For instance, the miners called for the resignation of Gorbachev and of the federal government, and the dissolution of the Congress of Deputies of the USSR, "whose political views were out of date...

...the press and the media in general over which the OFT wished to exercise strict "worker control...

...This did come as a complete surprise to everyone: our Marxist theoreticians, our bureaucrats, our technocrats and to us, the intellectual democrats...

...Three Generations of Soviet Workers In order to understand the development, complexity, and ambiguity of the worker movement in the USSR at the time of perestroika, it is essential to take account of the profound transformations that have occurred in the organization of the world of work during the past few years of "real socialism...

...many of them were former peasants still engaging in physical work, but of a different type...

...Remembering the government's failure to keep the promises made to their colleagues in the Donbas and the Kuzbas, only 5 percent of the miners of Vorkuta signaled their confidence in the traditional institutions...

...Since the beginning of the thirties, the policy adopted by the Soviet authorities toward the working class had been a subtle combination of repression (under Stalin, the right to work had been defined by the harsh labor regulations of 1932 and 1938 and the introduction of the labor book) with the possibility of promotion for the "best" workers...

...The sociologists concluded that the worker groups are so highly politicized that there can be no question of isolating and eliminating the ringleaders...

...By the first three months of 1991 these strikes had affected more than three million workers in the three republics of Russia, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine alone...

...In addition to issues of pay and of giving the miners greater autonomy under workers' control, the strikes "wage[d] the struggle for the liquidation of the bureaucratic and administrative machinery...

...A survey carried out in Leningrad in the mid-sixties showed that 35 percent of young workers were dissatisfied with their working conditions...

...The Politicization of the Labor Movement These hesitations became obvious in the course of the first and second congresses of miners, held in June and December 1990...

...Yeltsin had, from the very beginning of perestroika, posed as an enemy of FALL • 1992 • 507 privileges, a "genuine proletarian leader," a product of the Urals's working class...

...This plan was an alternative to the more cautious and progressive plan presented by the Soviet Prime Minister N. Ryjkov, which was adopted by the Soviet government...

...Some intellectuals interpret this as proof that the unlettered masses are incapable of organizing and promoting any real civic spirit...

...They were asking, for instance, for the allocation of a piece of soap per week, the provision of hot meals at the canteen, for state shops to stock supplies of basic products...

...So with Yeltsin when in July 1991 he decreed the elimination of the party committees in enterprises—this merely confirmed the existing state of affairs...

...Workers of the third generation (born in the period 1950-1960 and entering their active life in the years 1970-1980) seemed, at the beginning, to have a good chance of promotion through education...

...The crucial question—that of the increase of productivity —has not yet been faced...

...and their standard of living improved considerably, particularly during the post-Stalin era...

...Despite the proposed increases in wages— which made little difference in view of inflation—the workers were particularly incensed by the placing of enterprises under the jurisdiction of the Republican authorities and the fact that enterprises were given the right, "subject to worker control," to dispose of the part of the production that had been freely sold, even abroad...

...At the same time, they object to the introduction of economic reforms into enterprises and, in particular, the development of work brigades, which "diminishes the cohesion and collective solidarity of the workers of the same workshop...

...The future of the "hegemonic class of developed socialism" is yet to be seen...

...How often, in our Moscow kitchens, have we scoffed at the passivity and ignorance of the working class...

...The breakup of the USSR into a number of independent states led to the dispersal of the worker units set up so laboriously during the period 1989-1991...

...The central power...

...Products failing to meet quality standards were no longer "passed," that is, no longer counted in the calculation of bonuses...

...The investigation of these problems was generally left to certain institutions that submitted confidential reports on "public opinion" to the authorities...

...and the workers' club of the diesel engine factory in Jaroslavl, which had been set up after a long strike in that factory in 1988...

...The Miners' Strike During the years 1986 to 1988, there were reports in the press, for the first time, of strikes in some twenty enterprises, including the Kamaz lorry works at Brezhnev and the bus drivers at Chekhov and Kichinev...

...There, the demands put forward by the strike committees, which had been formed immediately, were of a very radical political character...

...In this sense, the events of 1989 were reminiscent of what had happened in 1917: there came into being (usually in large enterprises) a collection of autonomous centers whose existence made clear the breakdown of the existing political and economic structures...

...The strikes were less spectacular than in 1989, but they involved more people (1.6 million strikers as against 600,000 in 1989) in 124 industrial centers (excepting the Baltic Republics, Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, where the central authorities had ceased to keep an account of movements and strikes inspired mainly by nationalistic considerations...

...Corruption had spread to all levels, so that the workers had come to believe that the shortages of commodities and consumer goods were in fact engineered by the officials, the nomenklaturists, who obtained high-quality goods through shops reserved for their exclusive use, their special distribution network, and their personal relations, leaving the honest workers with nothing but their bread ration...

...To begin with, the miners did not limit themselves to economic demands...

...This was the "order," or "zakaz" system, organized by the trade unions or workers' committees...

...These lines, quoted from an editorial in the Literaturnaia Gazeta at the time of the major strikes by miners in Donbas and Kuzbas in July 1989, provide a basis for a discussion of the worker movement in the Soviet Union during the troubled period of perestroika...

...Abandoning the attack on the major scandals implicating high party officials who ran a veritable "Soviet Mafia," it turned soon to more modest forms of a parallel economy, such as moonlighting or black marketeering in a small way...

...Since 1985-1986 the call for reforms from above launched social currents, with resistance from the conservatives and opposition from elements wanting more radical changes...

...Such a transformation had, in fact, already begun...

...The "tekuchka" (frequent changing of jobs) continued to constitute (as it had done since the thirties) a form of workers' protest, a substitute for striking, which was forbidden...

...reducing the powers of the central economic authorities...

...police checks in public baths (for the same purpose...

...The number of strikers involved increased from about six hundred thousand in 1989 to over three million in the first half of 1991—relatively low in view of the tens of millions of industrial workers, but considerable in a country where, for seventy years, the very idea of a strike had been inconceivable (among not only the authorities, but also the vast majority of the workers themselves...

...Many of their demands concerned the question of privileges and social injustice...

...After seventy years, during which the working class theoretically wielded supreme power, 504 • DISSENT only a small minority of workers (9 percent) believed that strikes were "a normal method of dealing with labor conflicts...

...They alone could put an end to the exploitation of the people by the state, the nomenklatura, and the technocracy...

...There is, nonetheless, a minority of workers (25 percent to 30 percent...

...From 1988 onward, the world of Soviet labor was faced with an entirely new problem: unemployment...

...After being founded, originally, on profound mistrust (less than 1 percent of the Donbas miners on strike in the summer of 1989 had faith in the movement "Democratic Russia"), the relations between the two rapidly became more friendly through the intervention of Boris Yeltsin...

...As for striking, 75 percent of the miners now considered it "a right as important as any other kind of freedom...

...They proclaimed their lack of confidence in the existing institutions and traditional authorities...

...The real improvement in living standards in 1960-1975 began to slow down in the second half of the seventies, according to various Soviet statistics on consumption, although there are few really reliable statistics...

...Meanwhile, Andropov proposed the simplest method of stopping the drop in productivity —by reducing wastage and reinforcing labor discipline...

...In May 1987, Moscow television showed pictures of a strike in a Moscow factory: the workers were protesting against deplorable hygienic conditions and the numerous accidents at work...

...They also called for the nationalization of the party's property, the adoption of a multiparty system, and a change in the organization of enterprises and government based on the party system...

...According to a survey made in September 1989, most of the new recruits of the OFT were semiqualified workers and "second-generation" manual workers (to use Gordon and Komarovski's classification) attached to the values of the "era of developed socialism," irritated with the "debauch of democracy" engendered by glasnost...

...In the face of the "sabotage" of the ministerial bureaucracy, the growing power void, the rupture of the economic apparatus, and the breakdown of authority, the solution recommended by these committees was to create a sort of self-management, based on the autonomy of enterprises (officially encouraged by the reformers) and "worker control...

...While the main demands continued to be economic (the doubling of wages in anticipation of the next price rise, scheduled for April 2, and higher pensions), the character of the strike was highly political...

...In the space of a few months, miners' wages have increased from 2,000 to 10,000 and even 15,000 rubles a month...

...Every communist [says the text of a tract circulated by the Mejdurechensk workers' committee] is free, like every other member of a civilized political party, to spend some time on politics, if he so wishes, out of working hours and away from his place of work...

...In fact, the strike, as shown by L.A...

...In its address to the people, precisely entitled "The Confidence Crisis," the First Conference of representatives of the strike committees of the Kuzbas explained that the real reason for the strike was neither the drop in the standard of living nor the deterioration of the ecological situation but the loss of confidence in all authorities—political, economic, professional, and trade union—when the problems were becoming more acute daily...

...The text drawn up at the end of several weeks of debate, in which a number of selected representatives of the "democratic forces" were invited to participate, described the labor movement as the sole "organized social body capable of preventing the conservatives from returning to power...

...The success of the OFT in certain enterprises, encouraged surreptitiously by conservative elements of the party, indicates that some of its ideas were supported by the workers, disoriented both by political developments and especially by the economic crisis...

...Nevertheless, the Union deemed it necessary to explain: "The market plus planned organization, the great discovery of the twentieth century, should settle the relations between enterprises...

...Staff reductions, leading inevitably to increased unemployment in industry, have so far been postponed due to pressure from the base...

...Once the initial shock was over, observers—both foreign and Soviet— thought that might be the case...

...It led, first, to radicalization of the political opposition against those designated by both the newly freed press and the reformers as "conservatives" (in the eyes of the workers, this group included the administration, the party, and trade-union officials...

...In contrast, salaries of university professors have risen much more slowly, from 1,000 to 1,800 rubles...

...The most important ones included the "Union of the Workers of Gorlovka," the "Vorkuta Democratic Labor Movement," the labor unions of Briansk, Minsk, and Petrozavodsk, the "Independent Syndicate" of Perm, and so on...

...and the aim of the Union was to "accelerate the process of perestroika insofar as the existing institutions were not capable of taking radical measures to overcome the forces of conservatism and reaction...

...The process of eliminating party influence in the work place and administration had, in fact, begun before the decree came into force...

...No party or trade union has emerged on a national scale out of the multitude of workers' organizations set up between 1989 and 1991...

...The strikers obtained satisfaction on many of their purely economic demands—though most of the promises made by the government were not kept—and, a few months after the strike, the small advantages gained had been whittled away by inflation...

...It is true that the two attempts to set up an independent trade union—that of the engineer Klebanov at the end of 1977, and that of the Human Rights militants, who at the end of 1978 set up the SMOT (Free Workers' Interprofessional Union)—failed dismally...

...This "economic philosophy," he explains, is based on the guarantee of stable prices, low salaries ("guaranteed poverty"), a very small pay range, numerous free services, little incentive to work, and a general shortage of consumer goods...

...A further demand was that all enterprises should be placed under the jurisdiction of the republican authorities, and that the enterprise should be allowed to sell part of its production directly and share the profits with the workers...

...The principal one was worker discontent with arbitrary rule and injustice when salaries were reduced as a result of the malfunctioning of the economy as a whole...

...The resulting fluidity beneFALL • 1992 • 499 fited the regime in two ways...

...Gorbachev's visit to Minsk, for the purpose of praising the legendary patience of the Byelorussian people, did not of course put an end to the strike, which, like most of the other strikes, in the coal basin in particular, lasted until the end of May 1991...

...The quality of the food supplies available in a certain region or even an individual enterprise is difficult to determine with any certainty, owing to the introduction, toward the end of the seventies, of a parallel channel through which workers were able to obtain scarce commodities directly from their place of work...

...Translated by ALINE WERTH 510 • DISSENT...

...The most important strikes were those at the bus factories at Likino and at the Diesel motor factory at Jaroslavl (December 1987...

...Thus the drive for reform in the years 1986 to 1989 had two results...

...The following day, over a hundred thousand workers occupied the center of the town, demanding "market economy prices, market economy wages" and the resignation of Gorbachev and the Pavlov government, "puppets of the CPSU, a party which has brought the country to ruin and is now clinging to power...

...Meantime, the majority of "independent workers" organizations had declared themselves in favor of the economic reforms drawn up by the Russian government—the "Yeltsin Plan," which provided specifically for the freeing of prices, a decrease of production, and the closure of a large number of unproductive enterprises...

...Nonetheless, owing to the resentment with which the most highly politicized elements of the workers viewed the privileges enjoyed by the nomenklatura (aggravated by the economic crisis, for which Gorbachev was held responsible), the workers' organizations tended increasingly to side with Yeltsin...

...the social differentiation created by a market economy...

...The workers were violently critical of the staff of the KGB cells set up in enterprises (the infamous "personnel sections...

...With the conservatives having been eliminated after the failure of the coup d'etat of August 19-21, during which the active, politicized working class sided unequivocally with the resistance and the party committees were pushed out of enterprises, what enemy remains...

...Surveys made of a number of specific work milieus (Donbas miners, metallurgists in the Urals) show that the promotion rate slowed down considerably during the past ten years...

...The workers present themselves as the "best defenders, the guarantors of the success of perestroika," fighting the "conservative forces...

...POSTSCRIPT: According to the latest reliable statistics, there were only 350,000 strikers (in industry) in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus between July 1991 and June 1992...

...Extra rubles in the pay "check" were of little use when everything was in short supply...

...Although a number of these proclaimed aims similar to those of the "Union of the Workers of the Kuzbas," others, belonging to the "Workers' United Front" (OFT) held diametrically opposite views...

...In this democracy, where voting is by show of hands, only 2 percent of the workers' committee leaders were party members...

...in 1978, this percentage had risen to more than 72 percent...

...and second, economic upheavals, bringing labor problems hitherto unknown to Soviet society...

...The strike movements, though they have, in the three past years, spread to other sectors (metallurgy, textiles, construction, and so on) and to other regions (for example, Belarus, Urals, the Vorkuta basin, St...

...industrial centers, some better supplied than others...

...They protest obstructions by the party, the trade-union apparatus, and the "parasites living at the workers' expense...

...They were only good for deposits into savings accounts...

...In December 1987, N. Kostakov, assistant director of the Gosplan Research Institute, was reported in the journal Sovetskaia Kultura and in all the Soviet media as saying that some two million workers had been "temporarily released" since 1985...

...Action became more widespread at the beginning of April after the federal government had, on April 2, introduced a sharp increase of retail prices (an average of 200 percent...

...A new generation of worker activists, composed of ordinary workers or former trade union or party officials now gone into opposition, emerged, with such figures as N. Boldyrev or S. Vassiliev, the leaders of the labor movement in the Donbas, who had been punished in former years for their premature attempts to democratize the leadership of the enterprise...

...Thus the main result of the strikes, apart from disorganizing production, was to institutionalize hundreds of "strike committees," which tended to replace the official trade unions and party committees...

...But 25 percent of the workers complained of the authorities' deplorable attitude toward the people, 17 percent of the catastrophic situation of society as a whole, 15.5 percent of conflicts with the local authorities, and 10 percent of a general loss of confidence in the system...

...The time of reforms "from above" was past...

...most of them young and skilled, who are prepared to face the challenge of the switch to a market economy...

...One recent consequence, however, is inflation, which has been running at 25 to 50 percent a month...

...And the channels of social mobility were gradually narrowed in the years from 1960 to 1985...

...Both the second pan-Russian miners' congress and the "Labor Confederation" demanded, in particular, that enterprises be transferred to the jurisdiction of the Russian republic...

...There was, thus, widespread surprise when, within ten days, the strike that began on July 10, 1989 in the Cheviakov mine, near the small town of Mejdurechens, spread to over two hundred mines and enterprises in the industrial basin in the Kemerovo region (Kuzbas) and then to the mines of the Donbas, involving between three hundred and four hundred thousand workers...

...During the month of March 1991 alone, over 540 enterprises (about 500,000 workers) went on strike, mostly in the mining regions of the Donbas and Kuzbas, which were always in the forefront of the movement...

...The revelation of many cases of large-scale corruption (the "caviar scandal," the "diamond scandal") involving top figures in the Brezhnev regime (and Brezhnev himself) finally convinced the average person of the corruption of the rulers, so that the ground was now prepared for a "loss of confidence" in the existing authorities and institutions...

...The new technocrats, already denounced for their "inhumanity" toward the working class as soon as they begin to talk about cutting staff...

...identity checks in lines outside shops (to detect workers going in search of provisions instead of working...

...The surveys made by the sociologists sent to investigate the situation reported that the strike movement had become far more radical than in the summer...

...It should, however, be borne in mind that, at a time when social mobility was restricted, and the elite more and more firmly ensconced, many people joined the party as a pure formality, without any political motivation...

...Gimpelson, are deeply attached to an economic philosophy incompatible with the development of a market economy...

...Worker groups in a growing number of enterprises had already been taking over the party premises...

...Their work illustrates very clearly the interactions, tensions, and conflicts in the machinery of social mobility...

...As a result, workers' living standards depended not on their wages but on the different services supplied by various social funds...

...This union, the "Union of the Workers of the Kuzbas," which came into existence during the fourth conference of labor committees of the Kemerovo region, indicated how much progress had been made since the summer...

...Increase of Worker Discontent The situation when the new team came into power, in 1985, was as follows: expressed through the worker movement was discontent of various kinds, mainly by passive resistance, practiced widely by the working class since the thirties...

...There were about fifty such organizations, of which the best-known were the workers' club in Sverdlovsk— Yeltsin's home town—formed by students at the university, together with workers from the turbine factory in the same town...

...Their professional hopes were not realized, and their chances of promotion were slight, despite high qualifications...

...On the other hand, the reduction of the average age of the working class (in the 1970s, 93 percent of industrial workers were recruited from among the under twenty-fives) and the raising of the general level of education (76 percent of young workers taken on during the twelfth five-year plan had received a secondary education) led, particularly after the second half of the seventies, to a latent social crisis, manifested by various signs such as widespread discontent among young workers who had received a good education and technical training...

...At the beginning, the government agreed to negotiate with these committees in order to stop the strikes (which had lasted, on average, between three and six weeks...

...But when the government finally drew up a draft law on "Methods for the Settlement of Labor Conflicts," strike committees and other "independent labor organizations" were excluded from the list of organizations legally permitted to organize protest action...

...Consequently, the miners of the Donbass and those of the Kuzbas no longer have a common enemy to hold responsible for their common woes...

...Fifty-three percent of them replied that the main reason for the strike was the low standard of living...

...In the course of the second congress, it was clear that the delegates were being gradually converted to the idea of a market economy...

...Living Standards and the Quality of Work From the economic viewpoint, the end of the Brezhnev era was marked by a slow, gradual deterioration of the workers' living standard...

...Nevertheless, the percentage of those who thought it necessary to reform the politicoeconomic system as a whole increased from 20 percent to over 35 percent between the beginning of 1988 and the summer of 1989, highest among the most skilled workers, and in the thirty to forty age group...

...A team of sociologists, sent into the field by the All-Russian Center for the study of Public Opinion (VTSIOM), interrogated several thousand workers...

...How is this shrinkage of the protest movement to be explained...

...The first consequence of quality control of all industrial products, which had formerly applied only to the armaments industry, considerably reduced the salaries of millions of workers...

...The few sociological studies made of the working world dealt only with such subjects as "the raising of the educational level of the working class" or "the out-of-work activities of the various categories of workers," and so on...

...But this is a stage of transition...

...Promotion was by "on the job training," not necessarily involving any extra training or material advantage...

...The Soviets, harking back to the myth of a golden age of Soviet democracy, were to be the organs of a truly popular power...

...Members of the first generation (born in the 1910 decade, and beginning their active life in the thirties) took the country through the stage of industrialization, without themselves benefiting much from it...

...What is better, to become a trade union in a post-communist society or, in the next free elections, to stand as a workers' party...

...Thus, only a few months after the rebirth of a workers' movement in the Soviet Union, it had become the scene of political clashes between conservatives and radicals, even though it meant to be completely nonpolitical, strictly a labor movement...

...Were the soviet authorities faced with a nationwide movement, on the lines of the Polish Solidarity...

...The praise of a market economy was greeted with considerable surprise, being regarded by many as due to the influence of "democratic forces" outside the labor movement...

...On December 11, 1982, a month after the death of Brezhnev, Pravda, departing from its usual practice, published the minutes of the last meeting of the Politburo, dealing with the discussion of the large number of letters received from workers FALL • 1992 • 501 and peasants, complaining of "degradation of work," the "fabrication of statistics," the arbitrary allocation of bonuses and housing, the misappropriation of funds, and other "contraventions of law and justice...

...black marketeers and parasites...

...The campaign against corruption did not last long...

...between generations...

...For all this, strike movements, though still not numerous at the national level, were no longer an exceptional event...

...In a region where infant mortality reached a record figure (10 percent of Novokuznetsk), the existence of "closed" clinics was a provocation...

...Most of them were inspired by local complaints affecting certain enterprises (increased speed-up, dismissal of workers for "professional errors," salary cuts, and so on...

...And, lastly, 25 percent, if dismissed, would be prepared to work in the private sector...

...In many factories, "referendums" were organized for expulsion of the party committees...

...The Communist party presence in enterprises has been eliminated, the KGB has been disbanded, and enterprises have been placed under the jurisdiction of the various republics...

...Since the end of the fifties, the situation had evolved into less repression (the harsh labor laws had been abrogated by Khrushchev in 1956) but fewer real possibilities of social promotion...

...Gordon, revealed that there was a profound distrust—unexpectedly profound —of all existing authorities...

...The peoples' deputies, elected four months earlier, enjoyed the confidence of only 14 percent of the strikers, the head of the CPSU (Gorbachev) 6 percent...

...According to an article in Sovetskaia Rossia (January 12, 1987), 68 percent of the workers in the enterprises in which the investigation had been made (metallurgy, mines) had had wage cuts of fifty to seventy-five rubles per month (on an average wage of two hundred to three hundred rubles...

...These surveys carefully omitted any analysis of the relations between the working class and the institutions, the authorities, and the whole power apparatus...

...On April 13, dozens of enterprises in Minsk went on strike...

...L.A...

...Second, and equally astonishing, they did not explode in blind rage, as both the government and the intelligentsia thought might happen...

...Donbas and Kuzbas minters demonstrated the truth of "born a miner, die a miner...

...The only conflicts that could exist within enterprises or branches of industry were those of a "non-antagonistic" nature...

...As a result, the strike looked, at first, like the embryo of a new power...

...As pointed out in numerous publications of workers' committees, the movement had great difficulty, from the outset, in defining its relations with the intellectuals and the "democratic forces...

...In less than two years, considerable changes had taken place...

...Such committees had come into being not only in enterprises where strikes had been organized but also in many which had not...

...As Gordon and Komarovski write: "This third generation is no longer satisfied with the existing economic mechanisms and production relations...

...The first economic reforms, introduced gradually in 1986, added to the confusion occasioned by glasnost...

...and those increasingly dissatisfied with a system, 502 • DISSENT which, after frustrating their consumer wants, now blocked individual advance, and this in a society, a "workers' state" no less, where the worker is, in reality, at the bottom of the social scale even though his or her wage may be higher than that of many intellectuals...

...The working world was still very split, with divisions between enterprises, privileged and less privileged...

...These strikes were mostly short (lasting a few days) because the administration quickly promised to improve working conditions and raise wages—which did not, however, solve the problems, because even when wages were raised, the increases were quickly absorbed by inflation...

...The Soviet of the Kuzbas Workers' Committees, supported by a large number of the Donbas workers' organizations, therefore called for a general strike on the first of March...

...How reconcile a market economy with self-management...

...When the Bolsheviks on October 26, 1917 instituted "workers' control" they only legalized a situation that had existed since the summer of 1917...

...But this time, as J. Medvedev points out, the campaign was the result less of a political maneuver than of strong pressure from below, the working class in particular...

...This "silent revolution" gave birth to thousands of worker groups, work committees, workers' clubs, and other strike committees, which, in some cases, went beyond the rights granted to them by the new legislation on enterprises and quickly became "micro-power centers...

...The strikers were voicing their protest against living and working conditions of another age: in addition to demands for higher wages, at a moment when inflation had caused prices to rise by more than 50 percent since the beginning of 1989, the miners concentrated on details that were an eloquent indication of their abject misery...

...The reinforcement of discipline took the form of spectacular measures with the main symbol of Andropov's accession to power imprinted in people's memory: supervision of workers' diligence...

...The situation was saved by the agreement reached between Gorbachev and Yeltsin at Novo-Ogarievo, putting an end, temporarily, to the principal workers' strikes...

...Since the "hot summer," in fact, there have been only two real "strike periods"—in the autumn of 1989 and, above all, the spring of 1991...

...When these "guidelines" were given, the workers' committees had, in many instances, already taken over the functions of the local Soviets, which had lost control of the situation...

...The strike committees demanded the abrogation of the "Brezhnev Constitution" of 1977, "the recognition of the right to pluralism," "independent trade unions and social organizations," "free access to all information, the right and resource to bring out independent newspapers and publications...

...Workers, concludes the sociologist V.E...

...The mass recruitment of workers to membership in the party was taken to symbolize the union between the party and the people...

...Already, during the Eighteenth Party Congress, certain workers' delegates had spoken of the problems tormenting the working class...

...In the first place, many of the political demands of the workers' movements have been satisfied...

...The transition from the communal apartment to an individual one became the symbol of this improvement in the standard of living...

...On the other hand, it preserved the mechanisms by which a social consensus was maintained at the height of Stalinism...

...What new economic culture can be created, for instance, in view of the passivity of many worker groups that have to be pushed into action...

...In the course of the winter of 1989 to 1990, dozens of other labor unions were formed, even in places not affected by the strike movement...

...The result was to force the reformers to adapt their program to the demands and the pace of a movement stimulated by the new-found freedom of speech...

...In 1983, worker families in the Donetz region had, on average, savings equivalent to six months' salary...

...For all this, 85 percent consider it unacceptable to dismiss workers...

...Since the fall of 1991, authorities in branches of industry where there had been labor conflicts have made concessions, despite criticisms by many economists, especially government supporters...

...between workers, skilled and unskilled...

...At Vorkuta, the strike committee had called for the formation of a new Soviet elected by a show of hands and composed, in the words of the committee, "of persons honest enough to enjoy the confidence of the miners, devoted enough to the cause and audacious enough to be reasonable...

...Instead, the strike was highly organized and well led...

...From the beginning of the strike the local authorities lost control of the situation...

...The result of all these measures, based not so much on the "Hungarian mode" praised by certain economists as on the martial law then in force in Poland, was to add greatly to worker discontent...

...Gimpelson concludes that there is a long way to go before the adoption of a "new economic philosophy" (with realistic and fluctuating prices, differentiated and higher wages, controlled levels of unemployment, and a market without lines or bribery...

...Indeed, the Soviet working class has always had a mythic status, in a state controlled by the party, representing "the political expression of the will of the proletariat, the ruling class of Soviet society...

...Instead, the transition to a "market economy" has led to enormous price rises, offset by wage increases in the most vital sectors of industry, and not to massive labor cuts...

...and—most important of all—giving the workers control of their production in accordance with the right of every individual to enjoy the fruits of his or her labor, an essential prerequisite for guaranteeing social justice in all spheres of life...

...In actual fact, though most of them had the advantage of a secondary education (or specialized secondary education), access to higher education, as shown by J. Markiewicz-Lagneau, in Education, Equality and Socialism (Anthropos: Paris, 1971), was, from the end of the 1960s, more and more difficult for children of working-class origin...

...Failure of the appeal to the workers' organizations to strike against the repression in the Baltic states (January 1991) showed that the working class could not be mobilized in defense of all the causes defended by the "democrats...

...The president of the Russian Congress was regarded more and more—as described in the "Appeal to Worker Groups," made on February 26, 1991 by the Workers' Committees of the Kuzbas, at a time of extreme tension in the relations between Gorbachev and Yeltsin—as the sole alternative to the return to power of the reactionary forces...

...498 • DISSENT There had, of course, been some strikes here and there, but most of them were connected with conflicts between nationalities...

...Without political freedom, no economic problem could be solved...

...This image of the "rebel against the system" very soon won over a part—the most dynamic part—of the Soviet working masses...

...Several surveys carried out by IMRD illustrate the attitude to unemployment taken by the Soviet population...

...In a deficit economy, the wage level, taken by itself, has only relative importance as an indication of living standards...

...and, second, to strong resistance against the introduction of economic reforms...

...At the same time, the government imposed heavier penalties for failure to respect work rules and raised food prices considerably...

...In hundreds of enterprises, workers' committees had driven out local party organizations and taken over their premises...

...The central power had demonstrated its inability to cope and no longer enjoyed the confidence of the people...

...From July 18 onward, representatives of FALL • 1992 • 505 several dozen strike committees set up, in Moscow, a "Committee for the Organization of Independent Workers' Movements...

...Workers readily admit that they do not work to the maximum of their ability, and that a surplus of labor exists...

...At a time when important policy decisions have to be made, the workers' committees, movements, and "coordinating" groups are more divided than ever...

...Localism is rampant, and centrifugal tendencies are stronger than ever, especially in Russia...

...Thousands of letters addressed by workers or workers' organizations to the press (especially in the first two years of perestroika) speak not only of the worsening of working conditions but of the general deterioFALL • 1992 • 503 ration of bureaucratic management and of conflicts with the administration, accused of "sabotaging perestroika...

...In this situation, the strikers proposed that a certain number of general measures be taken, some of them contradictory, such as closing cooperatives in the nonproductive sector, while giving enterprises more economic autonomy and the right to control a part of their production...

...The Andropov-Chernenko interregnum was marked by a distinct worsening of the "socioprofessional climate" (in Soviet sociologese...

...The question of these privileges, mentioned more and more openly by the media, together with inquiries into the condition of the "new poor," crystallized the resentment of the workers, first against the local nomenclatura and then against all the politicians...

...The proportion of workers joining the party had 500 • DISSENT continued to drop throughout the seventies, although, in 1983, 44 percent of the members of the party were still workers...

...They denounced cheating by the administration, trade unions, and party officials in the distribution of bonuses, lodgings, and holiday vouchers...

...The year 1990 was marked by the persistence and extension of the labor movement...

...to quote the words of a leader of the labor movement in the Donbas: "[A]fter thinking that we were earning three hundred rubles a month we realized that what we were really 'earning' was less than ten dollars a month...

...How can they accept—and make others accept—the sacrifices entailed by the switch to a market economy...

...There was a great deal of indignation about the privileges enjoyed by the nomenclatura...

...The workers on strike in mountainous Karabakh, in Erevan, in Georgia, or in Vilnius, were, first and foremost, Armenians, Georgians, or Lithuanians fighting for their national rights...

...And shortages spread...

...the local party committee-0 percent...

...Petersburg, Kiev) have not been continuous...

...As one of the leaders of the strike committees in the Donbas was to say, at the end of 1989, "[T]he proverbial patience of the Russian workers must really have been exhausted for the workers to have overcome their psychological aversion to strikes...

...This campaign was not without precedent, for Stalin had, on many occasions, appealed to the population to wage war against the corruption of the "bosses who take the view that the Soviet laws apply not to them, but to the little people...

...In addition to purely economic complaints, due to the standard of living, never easy to put into figures and, in any case, subject to wide variations, there were also complaints of a more political nature: against the "new overlords," said to be corrupt and arrogant, and more vague and general ones about the constriction of social mobility, which, until the seventies, had remained fairly open...

...By this "communiqué," which was followed by proposals designed to reinforce the penalties for "corruption, nepotism, misappropriation of funds and bribery," the authorities signaled their intention to fight energetically against all illicit activities for the purpose of improving the moral principles governing public life...

...These committees had replaced the old trade union bodies, in some cases taking over functions formerly exercised by the Soviets...

...Such widely different situations, due to the nonexistence of a really unified market, had several results: It tended to atomize the working class, to develop a spirit of loyalty to one's place of work, while encouraging the work force to be constantly on the move despite the guarantee of full employment...

...Although the social relations imposed by the "administrative control system" were bearable in the years 1930-1940 or even during the 1950s, when the industrial workers (mostly ex-peasants cooped up in collective farms, not free to travel because of the internal passport system) were subject to strict military discipline, such conditions were no longer acceptable to the new generation of urban workers in the years 1970-1980...

...In some industrial regions affected by the strikes (Donbas, Kuzbas, Belarus, Urals, the Vorkuta Basin) the strike committees replaced not only the trade-union and political structures in the enterprises but the local power structures as well...

...This generation of workers in the fifty to fifty-five age group is no doubt the one most attached to communism...

...The program of the "Union of Kuzbas Workers" favored a multiparty system and "the democratization of public life...

...Though all may not depend on discipline, everything begins with discipline," Andropov declared in a speech made on November 22, 1982, presenting his program of "economic reform...

...There have been considerable wage increases and a general reduction of economic pressure...

...The first new factor was that people became aware that they had been exploited...

...The Soviets and genuine democratic people's organizations, such as the workers' committees, must therefore become the organs of real people's power...

...The strikers, as is clear from the VTSIOM survey, had confidence only in their own strike committees (80.8 percent...

...Thus, the old demand for "worker control," in the sense, is paralleled by Yeltsin's assertion of the sovereignty of the Russian republic...

...These organizations never had more than a few hundred members...

...change of shops' opening hours...

...The workers were manual laborers of the traditional type...

...The range of demands and the coordination of the strike were, indeed, surprising...

...The "neo-Bolshevik" program of the OFT struck out indiscriminately against a variety of targets: the cooperatives, for "sucking the blood of the workers...

...They consider it useless to work beyond a certain limit: why should one work more, depriving others of work, especially as we get no more money for doing so...

...Gordon and V.V...

...But now, it is against the very center of our system that the large-scale workers' strikes are directed, the power of the Party," which presumably represented "the future and the aspirations of the working class...

...The working class, meanwhile, remained, in the words Rosa Luxemburg used to describe the German working class in 1918, in a state of "rigor mortis...

...The New Labor Organizations While several tens of thousands of miners from the Vorkuta basin were on strike, the first labor union at a regional level was established on November 18, 1989 at Kemerovo, the capital 506 • DISSENT of the Kuzbas...

...In short, between those whose only real desire was for the traditional "first give us something to eat, and then make your demands...

...Similarly, now that the workers' committees, through participating in the management of the mines, have acquired a certain autonomy, their energy could be directed to constructive ends...

...Such wage policies, applied in particular in large enterprises where there was social unrest, put a brake on workers' agitation...

...Despite all the talk about the "financial autonomy" or even "self-management" of enterprises, all decisions clearly continued to be imposed by the bureaucracy—though it was constantly denounced in the press as being "anti-perestroika...

...Discontent focused not so much on questions of pay as on the organization of the whole production process: the interruption of supplies to enterprises, the worn-out machines, the misuse of production capacities, and so on...

...The "new generation" of workers' leaders were far more radical than those emerging from the strikes in the summer of 1989...

...And worker discontent continued to take a passive form, as it had for decades past: absenteeism, poorquality production, and, above all, low output...

...Thus, for instance, 38.5 percent of the members of the strike committees in the Kuzbas, in July– August 1989 were communists...

...Reforms, they argue, are acceptable only where "real workers' control over the whole of the production system exists...

...It ended with a campaign to reinforce discipline at the workplace...

...Another complaint was that, after 1986, both salary and bonus scales had been revised, causing immediate reduction of earnings for many categories of workers...

...The committees, within a year or even a few months, either took power, or superseded the existing trade-union and political organs, proceeding by and large by peaceful means...

...This movement, which was to culminate in the mass strikes of the summer of 1989, was inspired by two factors: first, the ideological upheavals generated by glasnost...

...A year later, party members formed only 12.5 percent of the workers in charge of the strike committees...

...The world of work, as Moshe Lewin recently said, has remained "terra incognita," both for Soviet sociologists and for Western researchers...

...This institute has, until recent years, paid far more attention to the working class in Vietnam or in Cuba than to that of the Soviet Union...

...30 percent admit that a "certain amount of unemployment can be allowed in general...

...In addition to the social and professional rigidity, another factor also came into play— the steady drop in the prestige attached to manual occupations, although officially the population was still encouraged to enter them...

...The market economy, according to the program, represented an immense achievement for world civilization, while the absence of a market economy had been a great loss for the Soviet economy...

...In the course of the past two years, the workers' movement, increasingly radical politically, yet still hesitating on how to abandon an economic system that condemns workers to "guaranteed" poverty, has made an important contribution to the breakdown of the traditional institutions and authorities...

...As a result, the intelligentsia and then the nationalities began to stir...

...But the mass strikes of the miners in the summer of 1989—a completely new phenomenon —came as a great shock to the Soviet authorities and to the intelligentsia...

...This article, which originally appeared in the French journal Le Débat, is printed here with the kind permission of its editors and the author...

...The catastrophe at Chernobyl, revealing the widespread negligence of the supreme authorities of the country, also made the people aware of the ecological problems created by extensive and poorly organized industrialization, especially in such regions as the Donbas and the Kuzbas...

...Management...

...The problem was how to reconcile worker control, selfmanagement, a market economy, technocratic principles, and the social protection of workers threatened with reconversion...

...According to Soviet sources, there were in the years 1975-1985 some sixty or so major strikes...

...Now, three years after the "hot summer" of 1989, it seems that events went further than expected, but not so far as they might have gone...

...And, finally, 12 percent of the workers declared that they could count on no one...

...And if we do get a few dozen rubles more, of what use are they if they buy nothing anyway...

...These phenomena, which penalize workers insofar as all the economic reforms introduced under perestroika aim to make workers' wages dependent on their individual output, are of course ascribed to the "conservative elements of the economic and political authorities," suspected of conspiring to discredit the efforts of the reformers...

...drugs and sex...

...Komarovsky have studied three generations of the Soviet working class...

...The strike committees, in this way, proclaimed their intention to continue after the end of the strike, and to join forces with labor organizations that had already been set up before the major strikes of the summer of 1989...

...Most of these strikes were quickly crushed...

...To improve management and make the economy more efficient by increasing the productivity of labor—such were the long-term aims...

...Although withdrawal of efficiency, to use Lewin's term—increased worker resistance to speeding the pace of work, extra hours, bonus-changes, lack of safety and hygiene provisions, and so on—constituted the principal form of worker resistance in the sixties and seventies, it was not the only form it took...

...In the next ten years, "frictional unemployment" (the period between losing one job and changing to another) was likely, if a realistic labor policy was adopted, to affect between fourteen and nineteen million people...

...Those of the second generation, born in the thirties, beginning their active life in the fifties, had the advantage of possible promotion through education...

...The "Byelorussian Strike Committee," set up on April 13, drew up a list of the workers' demands including, in addition to those listed above, "the abolition of all privileges . . . the abolition of the KGB . . . the recognition of the right to individual ownership of land . . . the dissolution of the Parliament of FALL • 1992 • 509 Byelorussia . . . the holding of free elections under a multiparty system . . . the elimination of the party cells in enterprises and government establishments...

...The strikers also demanded the nationalization of all the properties of the Communist party of Byelorussia, to be transferred to a fund to help the victims of the Chernobyl disaster, "and to improve health and education services for the exploited working masses...

...The workers' committees in enterprises threatened with closure or reconversion (factories belonging to the Byelorussian military-industrial complex, for instance, or unprofitable mines in the Donbas) were naturally less enthusiastic about an uncontrolled change to a market economy...

...At the outset, many party militants served on the strike committees...

...The birth of the organizing committee began the process of institutionalizing the strike committees, which considered themselves the only true "revolutionary" organs capable both of defending workers' rights and of carrying out the reforms introduced under perestroika...

...A series of investigations carried out by the Institute of the International Workers' Movement (IMRD) and by the newly formed All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTSIOM) confirms the increase of worker discontent during the two years preceding the social revolt in the summer of 1989...

...and foreign and "cosmopolitan" influences...

...The IMRD surveys also reveal other interesting facts: 87 percent of the workers favor reducing the number of people employed in economic management and in the administration...

...The best way of channeling off their discontent would be by giving the ringleaders another means of action: arrangements could be made, for instance, for the strike committees to help in solving the general problems of the town or region, or participate in the work of the existing social organizations or Soviets...

...In November 1989 there were new strikes in another coal-mining area, where living and working conditions were particularly tough— the Vorkuta region, in the far north...

...Significantly, the declaration devoted far more space to criticism of party monopoly, privileges, and so on—that is, to political rather than economic questions...

...In this situation, it was more advantageous to be employed as an unskilled laborer in a "rich" enterprise, such as the tractor factory in Minsk situated in a generally well-supplied region, than to be a skilled miner in a small town in the Donetz area, where fresh produce was scarce...

...Significantly, the institute specializing in the study of the workers' world in the USSR was called the "Institute of the International Labor Movement" (IMRD...

...In short, most dramatic decisions have been deferred...

...It now remains to be decided how to achieve unity and what general policy to adopt—an extremely difficult decision in view of the problems involved...

...Up until now, despite the constitution of "independent trade unions" and of a "Confederation of Labor," no organization comparable to Solidarity has made its appearance on a national scale...