87 Paul T. Christensen, Russia's Workers in Transition: Labor, Management, and the State under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 67-72.
88 Michael Burawoy and Kathryn Hendley 'Between Perestroika and Privatisation: Divided Strategies and Political Crisis in a Soviet Enterprise', Soviet Studies 44 (1992): 371-402.
89 Gertrude Schroeder, 'Dimensions of Russia's Industrial Transformation, 1992 to 1998: An Overview', Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 39, 5 (1998): 251.
90 Theodore H. Friedgut and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, 'The Soviet Miners' Strike, July 1989: Perestroika from Below', Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 804 (Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1990).
of Article 6 of the Soviet constitution that enshrined the Communist Party's 'leading role', and the election of the Congress of People's Deputies and its president by universal suffrage.[163]
During the remaining two-and-a-half years of the Soviet Union's existence, coal miners exhibited a militancy and degree of organisation unparalleled among Soviet workers. Their strike/workers' committees and Independent Miners' Union (NPG) spearheaded a second all-Union miners' strike in March- April 1991 which called for Gorbachev's resignation. Reflecting miners' bitterness about the centralised allocation of resources (commonly referred to as 'ministerial feudalism'), their organisations also advocated unrestricted freedom of prices and markets.[164] As their hostility to the 'centre' increased, so did their support for alternative political arrangements - the complete sovereignty of the RSFSR under Boris Yeltsin, and independence for Ukraine.
An analysis of the miners' movement suggests at least two ironies. First, as Stephen Crowley has argued, 'Soviet coal miners fought against the Soviet system and for liberal reforms, including the market, but for reasons that were at odds with those of their liberal allies, reasons that at root were quite socialist'.[165] Producers of material wealth, they felt cheated by a system in which those who redistributed the wealth enriched themselves without doing real work. 'We don't earn', Crowley was told by a leader of the Kuzbass miners in May 1991. 'They give out, and they give out not according to labor but by how much they figure you need.' The market, understood as the means by which 'I earn my own, I buy my own, having sold my labor power', represented the antithesis of this system. It was a key ingredient of the 'normal', 'civilised' society for which miners and other Soviet citizens yearned.[166]
Second, although the movement threw its weight behind Democratic Russia in 1991 and continued to back Yeltsin and successive 'parties of power' after the Soviet Union's collapse, neither in the 1991 and 1996 presidential elections nor in the intervening parliamentary elections of 1993 and 1995 did the Kuzbass, Russia's principal mining district, vote in favour of Yeltsin or the parties supporting his administration.[167] As for Ukraine, the movement's support for independence, as characterised by one of its leaders, was predicated on the assumption that it would at last fulfil the Bolsheviks' slogan of October 1917: land to the peasants, factories to the workers.[168] What happened instead, according to another miner activist speaking in February 1992, was that 'we have changed from one political machine to another, with practically the same people [in power]'.[169]
Miners' activism, which extended into the post-Soviet period, was neither continuous nor universal. Nor were miners in this and other respects any more typical of Soviet workers than those in other occupations who stolidly tried to keep their heads above water in the rising tide of political and economic disintegration. The articulation of class varied a great deal in the late Soviet period, overlapping with occupation in some cases (e.g. the miners) and being overshadowed by national and regional identities in others. What was common across republic boundaries and branches of industry was that the collapse of the administrative command system and the Communist Party did not weaken but rather strengthened alliances between workers and management. This was because managerial control of enterprises and managers' role as the personification of the labour collective increased and would continue to do so in the post-Soviet era.[170]
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union workers have been major losers. Official statistics show that real wages indexed to 1985 (1985 = 100) declined to 55 by 1995. Thereafter, wages rose slightly, but in the wake of the financial crisis of 1998, fell again, and by the end of the century were approximately 50 per cent of their 1990 level. On top of this, workers in most if not all sectors of the economy experienced delays or non-payment of wages, the shrinking of benefits and a psycho-social disorientation which, though difficult to quantify, was no less real and goes a long way towards explaining an unprecedented rise in rates of alcoholism, suicide and mortality. Whatever else privatisation and other 'reforms' accomplished, they did not reverse the downward spiral in living standards that most workers experienced in the late Soviet period.
The first phase of privatisation (voucherisation and employee buy-outs) was completed by June 1994, by which time only 20 per cent of the total workforce remained within the state sector. Privatisation turned workers into shareholders. As of December 1994, some 53 per cent ofthe shares in medium and large-scale enterprises that had been privatised were held by employees. This proved to be the high-point of worker 'ownership'. By June 1995, as workers sold their shares to make ends meet and the second ('loans for shares') phase of privatisation got under way, the proportion dropped to 43 per cent and continued downward thereafter.[171] All the while, as the state reduced its subsidies to industry and directors siphoned off funds for other purposes, wage arrears mounted. By 1996, they comprised 7.7 billion roubles, or 131 per cent of the monthly wage bill in 'indebted enterprises', and by August 2000 the total wage debt stood at 40.5 billion roubles.[172]
This disguised form of unemployment was accompanied by others: the assignment ofpart-time work to wage earners interested in full-time employment, and the placement ofworkers on unpaid administrative leave. According to the standard definition recognised by the ILO, there were 3.6 million people (4.8 per cent of the active workforce) unemployed in 1992 but 8.9 million (10 per cent) by 1998. Nearly three-quarters of unemployed men were listed as workers, as compared to 53 per cent of women. Women were far more likely to leave the workforce 'voluntarily', either because of declining employment opportunities or curtailment of childcare services. Thus, the proportion of women in the workforce diminished from 51 per cent in 1991 to 47 per cent in 1997.[173]
Sectorally, there were 8.2 million fewer wage earners in industry in 1998 than in 1991, a decline of 36.8 per cent. Other sectors showing significant declines over these years included 'science' (which lost more than half of its workforce), transport and construction. Net gainers included finance and insurance (where employment rose by 73 per cent), and wholesale and retail trade.[174] Not included in official statistics but also increasing significantly in numbers were the self-employed, those involved in the sex trade and bodyguards.
163
Simon Clarke, Peter Fairbrother and Vadim Borisov
164
Clarke, Fairbrother and Borisov
168
Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Daniel J. Walkowitz,
170
Simon Clarke, 'Privatisation and the Development of Capitalism in Russia', in Clarke,
171
Linda J. Cook,
172
Goskomstat Rossii,
173
Goskomstat Rossii,