Soviet Miners’ Strike Spreads to More Fields

Coal miners walked off their jobs in four more regions, but the Siberian strikers who started the Soviet Union’s worst labor unrest in decades were told today to return to work by dawn Friday.

The official press agency said coal miners in Vorkuta in the far north, the Don River city of Rostov in southwestern Russia and the Ukrainian industrial center of Dnepropetrovsk walked out Wednesday. Miners in the Karaganda region in Soviet Central Asia today refused to work, Tass said. By evening, 14 mines in the region, home of the country’s third-largest coal fields, were reported at a standstill.

Seeking Local Control

Tass said their demands were similar to those of striking miners in the Donetsk and Kuznetsk coal basins, who are seeking greater local control over their industries and better wages and living conditions.

In Vorkuta, strikers sent a letter to the Kremlin asking for an “urgent resolution of the sharp economic and social problems of the coal sector, and also specific problems of workers of the far north,” Tass said.

Meanwhile, the strike committee for miners in Siberia’s Kuznetsk coal basin asked the estimated 150,000 strikers in the region to return to the pits at dawn Friday after a government and Communist Party commission agreed to give them greater control over their industry, said Vyacheslav G. Akulov, a strike committee member. The commission also agreed to improve the miners’ food, housing and working conditions, he said.

“We have agreed to interrupt the strike, not to end it,” Akulov said.