Soviet Miners Reject Offer, Continue Strike

Striking Soviet miners rejected government terms and ignored a back-to-work recommendation from their leaders Tuesday as what may be the most serious industrial unrest here since the 1920s continued to pick up momentum.

In the Ukraine’s Donets Basin, reputed to have the richest coal deposits in the country, a strike that began Monday at eight mines spread Tuesday to 31 more, according to the official news agency Tass.

In the Siberian coal basin, where the trouble started more than a week ago, most of the 110,000 protesting miners remained off the job despite official concessions and pleas by a senior politician that continued unrest could threaten President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s efforts to restructure the national economy.

“We decided to prolong the strike until there is full satisfaction of our demands,” a miner said in an interview on Soviet television’s main evening news program.

In another indication of the seriousness of the situation, a member of the parliamentary Committee on Law, Order and Legality confirmed that consideration of draft legislation governing strikes has been pushed forward.

The committee member refused to disclose any details of the draft law, but Tass said it is expected to “furnish a legal basis for a resolution of labor conflicts, including the current, large-scale coal miners’ strike.”

Combined with disturbances involving several of the country’s ethnic minorities, the miners’ strike is seen here as a major political and economic challenge to the authorities.

Traditionally, the Communist Party has been “extremely sensitive” to any kind of organized unrest among the proletariat, whose interests it theoretically holds sacred, a Western analyst noted. There have been strikes in the past, but the current one is believed to be the first--since the early days of the Soviet state--that is so widespread and involves so basic an industry.

Territorial Integrity

Meanwhile, in light of the ethnic basis of the Soviet Union’s republics, the tension among its numerous minority groups has raised concern, the Western analyst said.

“So both (issues) are potentially threatening to the whole process (of Gorbachev’s political program),” he said.

The pattern of spreading strikes is being compared to the labor unrest in Poland in 1980, although it has not gone so far as the Polish trouble, which led to the creation of Solidarity, the independent trade union.

Polish authorities imposed martial law in December, 1981, to rein in a process that they and their Soviet allies considered to be getting out of hand. But ultimately they relented, agreeing earlier this year to share power with Solidarity in a reconstituted parliament in the hope of winning enough popular support to put the impoverished country back on its feet.

Soviet miners are protesting poor living and working conditions and demanding greater operating and financial autonomy in the hope of improving their lot.

A special government commission headed by Nikolai N. Slyunkov, a member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, met with strike leaders in Siberia’s Kuznets coal fields. It promised immediate steps to improve supplies of food and consumer goods, a new schedule of shifts and premium pay for overtime and “greater economic independence of enterprises,” according to Tass.

Tass said that after the meeting the strike leaders recommended that the miners return to work starting with the 4 p.m. shift.

However, local party and government officials told reporters later that the strikers had generally ignored the recommendation. Film shown on television, said to have been made at 5:30 p.m., pictured striking miners filling the town square in Prokopyevsk, one of the centers of the unrest.

“They gave us their offer, but it’s not what we wanted,” an unidentified Siberian miner told the television crew. “It was half-measures.”

‘Unrealistic Points’

V. M. Ilyin, a member of the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies, argued that “not all (the strikers’) demands can be fulfilled.” He said there are “many unrealistic points in their list of demands.” For example, he said, the miners are seeking pensions equal to 70% of their wages.

The strikes have apparently been peaceful so far, with no reports of violence. But Tass reported that the “situation in the (Kuznets) region remains tense . . . despite efforts by workers’ detachments and militia units to maintain order.”

The agency referred to “the tense situation during numerous (strike) rallies” and quoted Slyunkov as urging “maximum prudence, responsibility and workman’s wisdom.”

Officials have said they will not use force to end the unrest.

Soviet television reported that the number of strikers in the Donets region, in the European part of the country, is “increasing sharply,” although it gave no total. According to the government newspaper Izvestia, 4,000 were off the job in one town, which has seven of the 39 mines said to be on strike.

The closed mines “include some of the biggest in the Ukraine,” Soviet television reported.

The television reporter characterized the Donets miners’ demands, which were patterned after those of their Siberian colleagues, as “reasonable.”

The reporter’s words were typical of the generally favorable line the Soviet news media have taken toward the unrest. One reason may be that in pressing for greater local autonomy, the miners are demanding only that officials implement steps that Gorbachev has called central to his reforms.

There has been little progress in decentralizing the economy because of bureaucratic opposition and the innate difficulty of transforming a planned economy into one more reliant on market forces.

Some analysts believe that Gorbachev might like to capitalize on worker unrest to put more pressure on the mid-level party and government bureaucrats resisting his reforms. It would require a delicate balancing act, however, to prevent such unrest from getting out of control.

Ethnic Friction

Adding to the political tension is the continuing ethnic friction. The death toll from four days of clashes in the Black Sea region of Abkhazia rose to 16 Tuesday, and officials declared a curfew and state of emergency “in district centers” throughout the area.

There has long been animosity between the Muslim Abkhazians and the larger Christian population of the republic of Georgia, to which Abkhazia is attached. Abkhazian fear of Georgian cultural and linguistic domination was sparked by plans to open a branch of a Georgian university in Sukhumi, a popular seaside resort that is the capital of Abkhazia.

The government has sent in troops after widespread weekend violence in which rail lines were ripped up and communications facilities destroyed. Tass said that the police were confiscating weapons from the people.

Times staff writer Dan Fisher is currently on assignment in Moscow.