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The Workers' Movement in Russia

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The Workers' Movement in Russia Simon Clarke Professor of Sociology Peter Fairbrother Senior Lecturer in Sociology Vadim Borisov Institute for Comparative Labour Relations Research, Moscow Centre for Comparative Labour Studies University of Warwick Coventry, UK STUDIES OF COMMUNISM IN TRANSITION SERIES Edward Elgar v Simon Clarke, Peter Fairbrother and Vadim Borisov, 1995 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani- cal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England Edward Elgar Publishing Company Old Post Road Brookfield Vermont 05036 USA British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Clarke, Simon; Fairbrother, Peter; Borisov Vadim The Workers’ Movement in Russia ISBN 1 85898 063 1 Contents 1. The Workers’ Movement in Russia 1 2. The 1989 Miners’ Strike in Kuzbass 17 3. The Kuzbass Regional Council of Workers’ Committees 81 4. The Independent Miners’ Union in Kuzbass 133 5. Sotsprof 209 6. The Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Unions 313 7. Is There a Workers’ Movement in Russia? 399 Name Index 413 General Index 419 1. The Workers’ Movement in Russia At one level the story of the workers’ movement in Russia can be briefly told. Although the workers’ movement appeared to play a decisive role in the collapse of the project of perestroika, in the con- frontation between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, and in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it was a mere bubble, formed in 1989, inflated in 1991, and burst in 1992. There is some truth in this caricature, but at the same time it was not an empty bubble. There are around eighty million workers in Russia, the vast majority of whom are as disillusioned with the new system as they were with the old, facing threats to their livelihood, to their security and to their peace of mind, engaged in conflicts at work almost every day of their lives. A significant number of such workers put their faith in the new workers’ movement, and the fact that the movement itself has faded does not mean that the problems that it addressed have gone away. It is not sufficient to note that the new workers’ movement failed to live up to the high hopes and expectations placed in it. It is important to begin to understand why it failed, to draw lessons from that failure for the future. In this book our aim is not so much to provide such an explanation, which we have outlined elsewhere, as to provide some of the evidence on which to base further discussion of such explanations and understandings, evidence which incidentally may provide some insight into the wider political processes of the perestroika and post- perestroika eras. With this aim in view, we have focused in this book on a detailed study of three very different organizations, each of which has had national significance, and which typify the three different ways in which new workers’ organizations have developed. The Independent Miners’ Union in the Kuznetsk coal basin (Kuzbass) in Western Siberia grew from the base up, out of the miners’ strikes of 1989 and 1991. Sotsprof, originally formed in 1989 as the Association of Social- ist Trade Unions, grew from the top down, developing primary groups from 1991. The Federation of Air Traffic Controllers’ Unions estab- 1 2 The Workers’ Movement in Russia lished its independence on the basis of a split in the official state trade union of the aviation industry. The focus on national organizations gives an exaggerated view of both the strengths and the weaknesses of the new workers’ movement. The political significance of the new workers’ movement between 1989 and 1991 depended on the specific political conjuncture in which workers’ organisations had a weight out of all proportion to their real strength in terms of the activities of organized workers on the ground. On the other hand, the decline of the organizations of the new work- ers’ movement since 1991 has not been linked to a diminution in such grass roots activity, which has, if anything, increased, although in less favourable circumstances and less dramatic form. Moreover, the very fact of independent workers’ activity had an impact, all be it small and undramatic, on the former official trade unions, whose modest reform was a factor in the decline of the new workers’ movement and perhaps an indicator of further changes to come. Our aim in this book is therefore to locate the new workers’ move- ment in Russia in its connections with the workers it claims to represent as well as with the national and local political authorities to whom it addresses its demands and whose development it seeks to influence. We would like to try to paint a picture that has sufficient depth to enable us not so much to judge as to understand the course of development of the new workers’ movement. The scope of the subject means that the picture necessarily remains impressionistic, with a number of linked vignettes, rather than offering a systematic treatment of the movement at all levels. But to do the latter would require a lifetime of work, a tolerant publisher and a patient reader. Before saying something about our approach to the subject, it is necessary briefly to put the elements of the workers’ movement studied in this book into their wider context.1 Although the Soviet Union was nominally a workers’ state, Soviet workers were systematically denied any institutional channels through which they could express and articulate their own interests, grievances and aspirations. The trade unions were strictly ‘democratic centralist’ organizations, supposedly expressing the interests of the working-class as a whole, as those were defined by the programmes and resolutions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and interpreted and implemented by local Party committees. Within the workplace the trade union’s primary responsibility was to make its contribution to the realization of the interests of the working-class as a whole by encour- The Workers’ Movement in Russia 3 aging the intensification of labour, reducing labour turnover, improv- ing the ‘discipline’ of labour, and encouraging the educational, social and moral development of the class. Workers’ resistance was constant and pervasive, but it was ex- pressed, dissipated and defused through the informal relations of the workplace. Spontaneous work stoppages by small groups of workers seem to have been fairly common, and most people knew of cases of demonstrations or riots which extended beyond the limits of the workplace, but these were rare, and were always suppressed by force, the most brutal being in Novocherkassk in 1962. However, worker opposition only very rarely took on an organized or public form – there was little contact, and no love lost, between worker activists and intellectual ‘dissidents’. Vladimir Klebanov, who came to the attention of the West when he protested publicly and was arrested in Moscow in 1978, had had a small organization in the Makeevka mine in the Ukrainian Donbass since the 1950s. On his release from psychiatric hospital he reconsti- tuted his ‘Combined All-Union Central Committee of Free Trade Unions’ in 1988.2 Similar groups, usually comprising a single ideolo- gist/leader surrounded by a small number of dedicated followers, could be found in other enterprises and other cities, but were equally ruthlessly victimized if their activities or writings were discovered by the authorities. The Inter-Professional Union of Workers (SMOT) had been established in 1978, inspired by Klebanov’s protest and provid- ing a link between a small number of dissident intellectuals, with its roots mainly among engineering-technical workers (ITR). SMOT had been effectively smashed in the early 1980s as three of its key leaders were arrested and two others deported to the West, but, like Klebanov and many other imprisoned dissidents, its former leaders resumed their activities as soon as they were released under Gorbachev’s amnesty in 1987. SMOT had links with the Christian Democratic ‘Popular-Labour Union’ (NTS), an émigré organization originally established in 1930 as the National Union of Russian Youth (NSRM). The NTS was a political organization, but sought particularly to recruit workers on the basis of its strongly anti-Communist Christian ideology of ‘popular- labour solidarism’. NTS had always claimed to have an underground network in the Soviet Union, and organized openly from 1988. These and other groups could not be called workers’ organizations, because even where they recruited workers they were strongly individualistic, following the line of exemplary individual protest, and this heritage, 4 The Workers’ Movement in Russia understandable in the period of repression, carried through into the first phase of the open workers’ movement. The disruption caused by the early phase of perestroika, and par- ticularly by Gorbachev’s wage reform, provoked a growing number of small wildcat strikes, which were usually settled rapidly in the tradi- tional Soviet way with immediate concessions designed to placate and isolate the striking workers, although a strike at the Yaroslavl Motor Factory in December 1987 grew beyond the authorities’ control, and lasted for a week. 3 Although most of these strikes and other forms of protest left no immediate organizational legacy, a new wave of activists emerged through them, and it was often these people who formed the nuclei of the small workers’ groups which began to be formed in cities around the Soviet Union. The ideology of these groups was predominantly syndicalist, appealing to Soviet workers’ antipathy to the intelligentsia by demanding the sharp reduction of the administrative apparatus, the sacking of managerial and technical staff and some form of workers’ control.
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