Word: kuzbass
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...strike soon spread to nine other cities in the Kuzbass. Grimy miners complained that when they came up after six hours underground, they could not find a bar of soap to wash with; the ration is one bar every two months. "Who can tell us what to feed our husbands?" shouted a woman protesting empty shelves in the stores. Many called for complete independence from central planning, insisting the miners could run things themselves...
Sensing victory, the Mezhdurechensk miners went back to work, but the strikes were just beginning elsewhere in the Kuzbass and the Ukraine as workers pressed for assurance they would share in the government concessions. At week's end the strike in Kazakhstan was winding down, but workers in the Donbass still held out over pension questions, prompting a government pledge that all the issues would be considered without delay...
...plans to revitalize the Soviet economy by encouraging local initiative. But to be effective, the idea of self-reliance and experimentation had to evolve into more than just a prescription issued from the Kremlin. Gorbachev can take satisfaction and possibly draw some political strength from the evidence in Kuzbass and Donbass that workers may be stirring from the "stagnation" of the Leonid Brezhnev years. The daily Sovetskaya Rossiya put it succinctly: "Perestroika, which has until recently been a 'revolution from above,' is getting strong support from below...