Strike wave shows explosive power of Soviet working class

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The contradictions of Boris Yeltsin 12 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1991 In the past month, spreading strikes have polarized political life in the Soviet Union. They became the main target of the official press. The authorities, however, were obliged to take a careful tack. They made a great show of sympathy for the "just" economic demands of the strikers, while darkly denouncing the political "ambitions" and "ultimatums" of "certain forces."

For several months, strikes had been spreading among miners in the main coal fields, who, besides raising economic demands, called for Gorbachev's resignation and the dissolution of the Soviet ruling bodies. (In most areas in the last elections, freedom of choice was still quite limited.) The price rises at the beginning of April, however, started a real snowball rolling.

For the first time, the workers' movement has taken the leadership of the opposition. The entire opposition has fallen in behind the strikers, organizing solidarity and material aid. But the strikes have become the locomotive of all the mass movements.

By the end of April, the threat to the ruling bureaucracy had become so great that both the official wing led by Gorbachev and the "oppositional" wing led by Yeltsin were forced join together in an attempt to rescue the nomenklatura.

Significantly, Yeltsin's leap from "opposition" to the "defense of order" earned a gushing accolade from The New York Times: "In a remarkable turnaround, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, setting aside their personal differences, pledged Wednesday to concentrate on saving the Soviet Union from political and economic disintegration. Their agreement is the first hopeful sign in months that radical reform can be revived and hard-line dictatorship avoided." (Editorial, April 26.)

Price rises spark an explosion The first blowup came in Minsk, in the republic of Byelorussia, where a reported 100,000 striking workers massed in the street to protest the price rises. This has been one of the better supplied Soviet cities, where workers were not used to having to pay black-market prices. So the drastic increase in the official prices came as a sharp jolt.

Although, overall, Byelorussia has been kept under tighter control than other parts of the Soviet Union, the national-democratic People's Front of Byelorussia has gained predominance in the capital, Minsk. It seems to have played an important role in the strike movements.

The combination of the national democratic movements and the workers' actions has invariably drawn the hottest fire from Soviet Communist Party organs, such as Pravda.

For example, Pravda correspondents in Minsk wrote on April 11: "If there are representatives of the strike committees and the Byelorussian People's Front at the microphone, the atmosphere becomes sharply politicalized. 'You won't buy us off with presents!' ... 'Put all the leaders on trial!' 'Dissolve the Supreme Soviets of the USSR and the Byelorussian SSR, as well as the Congress of People's Deputies,' 'Let the government negotiate only with the workers' unions and not with the [official] trade unions."

The Byelorussian strike was led by an organization called the "Workers Union," according to the usually well-informed and reliable Paris Russian weekly Russkaya Mysl'. The paper also reported that a strike committee was formed.

The "legal state" in danger A front-page article in the April 11 Pravda warned that de facto organs of power were being created. "The strikes follow differing courses, raise differing demands. But one general tendency is obvious—a passage of real power in the 'hot spots' to unconstitutional structures."

"The strike was growing not only geographically," the April 19 Russkaya Mysl reported, "but was spread to more and more industries. After the unexpected solidarity action of the workers in the biggest refining plants on April 3-5...strike committees started to arise in many enterprises throughout the country.

"In factories in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Noril'sk, Sverdlovsk, Donetsk, and Vorkuta, workers' committees declared their readiness to go on strike. The idea appeared of a political general strike, and it started to spread throughout the country."

A rally of 20,000 workers in Minsk on April 23 was portrayed by the New York Times as a failure. Nonetheless, its report showed a high level of consciousness on the part of participants. For example: 'It is we who feed the Communists, Nikolai Khralovich, a 29-year-old laborer at the Minsk tractor works, said. "They don't feed Soviet strikers in Minsk call for Gorbachev's resignation.

The Western press generally portrays Gorbachev's rival (and now ally) as a "free-enterpriser." Boris Yeltsin does claim to favor faster privatization than Gorbachev. But he also tries to present himself as the champion of those who would be the victims of such measures the workers.

His report to the Third (Special) Congress of the Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian Federation showed these contradictions.

In his introduction, Yeltsin said that the economic system in the USSR had put it "in the tail-end of civilization." But the basic problem was, he said, that the Soviet system "ignores people," who are hardly the central concern of capitalist economics. He called for more rapid privatization, while rejecting the price rises— the essential first step for a free-market economy. us.'"

"In his view," the Times continued, "the party, through the Gorbachev Government, was appealing to the principle of law and order but actually fighting to retain its own patronage positions and privileges now that Soviet workers finally are focusing on politics as the key to economic change.' The talk by Gorbachev and the rest of the bureaucratic leaders about a "state of laws" and "parliamentary democracy" is an attempt to defend the continued rule of the bureaucracy with arguments and forms borrowed from the Western capitalist countries. This Minsk worker showed that he saw through the basic pretenses of Gorbachev's reform line.

A specter of workers' revolution The reaction of the bureaucracy to all this The "opposition" leader called both for the "constitutional state" (Gorbachev's basic political formula) and "developing a ystem of direct people's rule." He proposed "increasing the minimum wage" and "lowering taxes on earned income."

His program even included "establishment by law of a list of socially important goods and services and a minimal consumer budget level for given zones of the Russian Federation" and alloting 20 percent of new housing to the underprivileged at special rents. The privatizers in East Europe have not done that, and those who try to follow them in the USSR will not either.

Yeltsin has something for everyone. But when the rise of the strike movement forced him to make a concrete choice, he showed his basic loyalty to his caste-the parasitic, antiworking-class bureaucracy.

-G.F. countries, every time the workers have gotten a chance to organize, revolutionary general strikes have developed quickly against the bureaucracy-as in Hungary in 1956 and in Poland in 1980. In the latter case, it was price rises that ignited the explosion.

Now, such a thing seemed a real possibility even within the vast Soviet Union. The bureaucracy could see the specter of its overthrow.

Gorbachev tried at first to counter the spread of strikes with new anti-strike laws. Asked his opinion of this in Paris on April 17, the Soviet president's rival, Boris Yeltsin, said: "With regard to the question of resolving the strikes, I think that the problem cannot be solved in this way [by anti-strike laws]. We wanted to form an interparliamentary group, with the participation of leaders of the republics and representatives of the country, but also the strike committees, the leadership of the [official] trade-union committees, and at this round table negotiate about further actions.

"After these negotiations, I intended to personally appeal to the miners and all the strikers to declare a moratorium on the strikes, for them to do that themselves. I am certain that they would respond positively to such a call. This would be a genuinely democratic principle of relations on all levels."

Yeltsin thus made it clear that he sought the same object as Gorbachev-except by persuasion instead of coercion. That is, he was playing "soft cop" for the bureaucracy. So, it is not surprising that on April 24 he joined with Gorbachev and the official leaders of the nine tame republics to appeal for an end to the strikes.

Yeltsin rallies to defend "order"

The appeal was adopted at a secret conference in a dacha outside Moscow. It was part of a compromise package presented as a last alternative to chaos in the country. The statement produced by the conference promised reconsideration of the price rises and new taxes. It even pledged that cost-of-living raises would be considered.

At the same time, the statement declared: "Taking into account the exceptionally acute crisis situation in the country, the leaders of the union and republics regard as intolerable any attempts to attain political ends through incitement to civil disobedience, strikes, or calls for the overthrow of the existing lawfully elected state power bodies."

New York Times correspondent Francis X. Clines commented that while Gorbachev conceded that he had made mistakes in his perestroika policy, "he won from Mr. Yeltsin and other republic leaders a call for 'strict compliance with current laws."'' In fact, Yeltsin rallied behind the political line of perestroika-the constitutional state, parliamentary democracy-the rule of the bureaucracy through legalistic forms.

A parting of the ways?

What is going to be tested now, Clines wrote, is whether the "trust" that Yeltsin has won by his past support of opposition movements and opposition demands will be sufficient to convince the workers to stop striking.

There are indications that confidence in Yeltsin has been eroding. For one thing, the contradictions of his populist line are more and more glaring. The polarization created by the strikes makes it harder and harder to offer something for everybody. The anti-bureaucratic consciousness of the striking workers clearly goes beyond Yeltsin.

However, in order for the movement to rise to the level necessary to fight and defeat the bureaucracy as a whole, a new leadership with a new political and social program is necessary—one that corresponds more consistently to the interests of the working people.

That is not likely to happen overnight. But there is no sign that the bureaucracy can halt the economic ruin. All its measures, so much lauded by the Western press, have only made it worse. And now it has been forced to promise to retreat from its concrete market reforms-the price rises and new taxeswhen it has no alternative.

It seems clear that the political crisis of the bureaucracy will deepen. In response to the disarray of the bureaucratic rulers and the ruin of the economy, a more consistent, more radical opposition will arise, based on the rapidly growing organization of the workers themselves.

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lems and grievances, as reflected by speeches