Soviet miners government

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Yesterday, Gorbachev was apprehensively looking over his shoulder at events in Poland and China. Today, his eyes are glued to the homefront, where hundreds of thousands of coal miners stopped work throughout the country.

The strike wave-the most powerful in Soviet history—began last month in Mezhdurechensk, a town in Siberia's Kuzbass coalfields. The workers had been forced to work speed-up, overtime, and night shifts with little compensation. They had suffered 152 accidental deaths in the past year.

A sit-in by 77 miners spread like fire throughout the coalfields. It was a fuse waiting to be lit. The strikers joined economic demands for more food, clothing, and housing with highly developed political de-. mands for more control over production and for stronger constitutional guarantees for individual freedom.

Workers' control of the mines almost immediately became the central demand of the strike. Around $46 million in profits had been produced in the six months before the strike, but only $3.4 million had been spent locally. This disparity led directly to calls for self-management of the coal industry.

Equally troublesome for the government was the formation of strike committees outside of the official trade unions. But this was inevitable, especially since the example of Solidarnosc in Poland.

Since Stalin, the official trade unions in the USSR have functioned as partners of the bureaucratized factory management system. One local union chairman was reported to be on vacation at a rest sanitorium throughout the strike.

As the strikes continued to grow, however, the national chairman of the coal industry's official trade union tried to recoup some credibility. He told the press, "Our position is that we support the demands of the Mezhdurechensk workers."

But by that time, it was too late. The strike had already spread throughout Siberia and into the Donets Basin in the Ukraine, (continued on page 11)