Word: coals
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week the Soviet leader managed to keep his balance atop a couple of spectacularly unpredictable waves. The last of some 300,000 striking coal miners, whose walkout at one point threatened to spread to rail workers and paralyze the vast Soviet Union, returned to their pits, mollified by a package of raises, consumer goods and political reform carrying no official price tag but estimated at $8 billion. In a dramatic bow to the intense nationalism of the Baltic republics, which were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, the Supreme Soviet, led by Gorbachev, approved a resolution endorsing plans...
...hard-liners the only threats to his position. If workers from other large industries take inspiration from the coal miners' success, as Gorbachev said he has, they could swamp the economy with a tidal wave of strikes. And with estimates that the budget deficit is already running about $160 billion and production growing by only 2.5% instead of the hoped-for 6%, Moscow would be hard-pressed to make more payouts like the one it gave the miners. Perestroika might make strikes more likely, since reform will eventually entail decontrolling prices and closing inefficient factories, measures that workers are likely...
...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...