Word: coaling
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...Coal miners walking off their jobs from the Ukraine to the Arctic Circle. Ethnic gangs battling in Georgia. Thousands of other dissatisfied workers threatening strikes. "The situation," said Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev last week as he surveyed the turmoil rocking his vast country, "is fraught with dangerous political and economic consequences." The question for Gorbachev: Will the "revolution from below," which he has been urging on his laggard countrymen, help accelerate his ambitious plans for reform -- or tear the U.S.S.R. apart...
...Kremlin was plainly alarmed that the strikes were eroding the party's control. Since the 1930s, no one had personified the state's ideal Soviet worker better than the propaganda hero Alexei Stakhanov, the coal miner who reputedly produced 14 times the daily norm. But there were no Stakhanovites in the Soviet Union's biggest coalfields last week. Wildcat strikes by more than 300,000 workers paralyzed some 250 mines and factories in the Kuzbass and Donbass basins, resulting in a 6 million-ton loss of production. The walkout spread as far as the coalpits in Vorkuta...
...front of Communist Party headquarters in the Ukrainian city of Makeyevka, 5,000 miners in battered helmets, their faces and overalls black with coal dust, staged a sit-in to demand better working and living conditions; their ranks eventually swelled to almost 150,000 from 94 mines. Far to the east, in the Kuzbass in Siberia, the numbers were even greater. About 180,000 miners abandoned their pits to occupy central squares in nine cities, plastering reviewing stands with homemade signs proclaiming DOWN WITH BUREAUCRATS and KUZBASS: CLEAN AIR, MEAT FOR EVERYONE, WE DEMAND SOCIAL JUSTICE...
...strike spread with electrifying speed. The first 77 Kuzbass coal miners walked off the job in Mezhdurechensk on July 10. The following day 12,000 workers from five mines in the area joined them. They drew up a list of demands, including better pay, more vacation, higher pensions. Their overriding complaint: despite Gorbachev's calls for greater local autonomy in managing the economy, bureaucrats in Moscow continued to wield arbitrary control over the mines and were holding back the bulk of their profits. Many local officials openly sympathized with the strikers. "Why not? They breathe the same...
Moscow quickly dispatched a high-level delegation to meet the strikers, led by Politburo Member Nikolai Slyunkov. Mikhail Shchadov, the minister in charge of coal mines, had earlier told the workers that they were not prepared for the independence they were demanding. But after negotiating with local strike leaders into the early hours of the morning, the Moscow delegation finally agreed to sign a protocol promising that the region's mines could decide on their production levels and investments. The state would raise miners' pay for night shifts by $50 a month, a 40% increase, improve food supplies and spend...