From Russia's coal country

UNESCO Courier, Nov, 1998 by Sophie Shihab

Russia's angry miners

Half of Russia's 900,000 miners have been sacked over the past seven years and the other half are struggling to make ends meet because they are being paid months, even years late. Their anger exploded last January

The legendary patience of Russia's miners came to an end last January when they suddenly revolted at Kuznetskaya and nearby places in the pine-forests of the Siberian taiga. For five days, in the half-light of the winter, the manager of the local coal mine was held hostage by a group of miners driven to desperation. Helped by their wives and children, they kept him prisoner in his office by barricading the door with tables and chairs. They had not been paid for three years, they said. They had no running water, no telephones. Their children could no longer go to school, which was fifteen kilometres away.

Their remote village, located in the Kuzbass region, the heart of Russia's coal industry, is a Soviet-style mining settlement like many others in the country's coalfields. The privileged status that all manual workers, especially miners, enjoyed in the Soviet Union was in fact only relative and partial. They may have been paid twice as much as teachers or doctors but they were often housed in insanitary wooden shacks, usually consisting of a single room and a tiny kitchen.

These hovels are still there, rows of them along muddy tracks which are either frozen or dusty according to the season. They date back to the time of the gulags, when mines were dug by prisoners in remote Arctic regions without any regard for profitability. When the market economy arrived, keeping them going became a tricky afair.

Many miners still live in such barrack blocks because almost no new low-cost housing has been built since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the end of the old Soviet empire has had plenty of other consequences. In Siberia, safety conditions in the mines quickly deteriorated as equipment wore out. The huge expanses of cheap housing which began to replace the old mining villages in the 1950s are no longer maintained.

In Kuznetskaya, thirty-two-year-old Maria Petrovna lives in one room with her husband and their two children, aged six and eleven. An ancient coal stove, a child's bathtub, a wardrobe, a shaky table and washing hung up to dry over the beds clutter up the space.

How has this family survived without any pay for three years? Partly thanks to the private vegetable plot behind each shack. To prepare for the long winter, potatoes have been stored in the cellar and as many things as possible have been pickled.

But in Siberia, kitchen gardens cannot produce enough nor for very long. So grandparents help out, chipping in with the pittance of a pension they still receive on a more regular basis. But this is not enough, and so families go into debt. This situation is widespread in Russia. It affects not only individuals, but firms (including the mines), those who provide services to them, their customers, the banks, the government - everyone is a borrower. The external debts of Russia's banks neared $200 billion by the time they almost collapsed this summer.

The miners also survive by stealing, by dismantling abandoned factories and other facilities bit by bit. Barter is becoming routine. The lone shop in Kuznetskaya no longer has any cash. At the beginning of the year, the manager "sold" basic food items to the miners, hoping to be paid when they received their wages.

He also distributed goods which he got through complicated barter negotiations involving coal from the mine. Sometimes the families have to try to sell by themselves tyres or nails obtained this way. Many miners have sunk into alcoholism, whose ravages are still on the increase in Russia, sending many to a premature death or disability.

Maria Petrovna and her relatives could take no more of this. They were tired of living off their wits, while the mine manager was living high off the hog. He had moved to a new area outside the village, where mansions have been built behind high walls.

In the West, mine closures in the past few decades have been isolated dramas, resisted by groups of workers. In Russia, such closures are happening at a time when the country itself is breaking up and plunging into a crisis whose outcome is uncertain. The first seven years of transition from communism to capitalism have ended in failure. The fate of the miners is no longer a major factor in the tragedy being experienced by the vast majority of people, including the middle class which was just starting to emerge, and the intellectuals, who are having a hard time playing their role as observers and chroniclers of this tormented society.

Half of Russia's 900,000 miners have been sacked since 1991. Only very few of them have managed to find other work. More dismissals are expected during the next few months, along with the sacking of other workers traditionally less well-organized, in Russia as elsewhere, than the miners. But most Russian trade unions have been discredited by their past collaboration either with the communist authorities, or with the present regime. So they cannot mobilize large numbers of people to support the miners, workers and others who continue to toil without pay for months or even years.