Writing in the August 19 issue of Workers World weekly, Bill Wayland describes this new phenomenon amongst the Russian working class. He points out that while unemployment has risen by 26% in the last 12 months, the average wage has fallen from $100 to $10 per month. With the demise of the USSR in 1991 the workers' movement appeared dormant with work stoppages being led by management-controlled official trade unions. During this period Wayland points out that privatization was not challenged.
But the trend changed with the miners' "railway war" in Siberia in the spring of 1998. Arising from this struggle the Russian-wide Council of Strike Committees was founded under the slogan of "All Power to the Strike Committees!". This gave new impetus to the anti-capitalist labor federation "Zaschita Trud" (Defense of Labor) which, having been formed in 1991, was rendered impotent up to this point by internal divisions fomented by the State Security Forces. Under the leadership of the late Makshakov, who was assassinated last month, Zaschita has established branches in most of Russia's 87 regions.
The first plant seizures since 1917 have occurred in the past two years with the first liberated plant being the "Sovietsky Paper Mill" in the Karelian forest, near the Finnish border. A British company that wanted the markets and machinery only purchased this plant in 1997. When the workers realized that plans were afoot to move the plant's machinery, they seized the plant and elected a "peoples director". Armed workers then defended the plant from special police units sent out by the bosses. Today the workers still control the plant, having repulsed an attack last July by police commandos and paid vigilantes who wounded two workers.
Yasnogorsk is a machine-building center in the Tula region which is south of Moscow, that, like many other Soviet-built industrial towns was devastated by capitalism. Wayland quotes a machine builder from the region who was telling him: "We were well off during Soviet times, everything we had we got during that period. Now we can't even buy bread while the managers and directors vacation in the Canary Islands!" Last September, having not been paid for 11 months, the workers seized the plant. They operated it under workers control. With workers guards protecting the plant, they produced and paid wages. When the two (plant worker elected) directors were arrested, the workers blocked the railway and took the plant managers hostage. After 10 months of struggle, on July 9 the workers won a new contract that the popular newspaper Perspectiva points out would put to shame any contracts signed in the developed capitalist countries. The workers in Yasnogorsk, reports Wayland, are planning to run a candidate in the December parliamentary elections. The Yasnogorsk workers have motivated 3,000 industrial workers in nearby Kimovsk to take similar action, after not having being paid for some 17 months.
In his conversation with Andrei Guan Ti Fa, the strike leader from Yasnogorsk said: "We hope the workers all across Russia will take power in their plants. But the next stage will be the fight for political power, and for workers' control over the economy of the entire country!
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