Miners’ Strikes Pose Dilemma for Gorbachev : NEWS ANALYSIS

During a visit to the Ukrainian industrial center of Donetsk last February, a reform-minded Mikhail S. Gorbachev tried to enlist converts to his cause among workers who up to then seemed at best suspicious, and at worst apathetic, about perestroika , his plan for economic and social reform.

Meeting with coal miners, the Soviet president urged that they “shove aside whoever lags on the road of perestroika , regardless of what armchair he is sitting in.”

Five months later, those same miners have shoved so hard that a tense Gorbachev appealed to them for the second time in 24 hours Sunday to ease up for the good of the country.

They’ve shoved in the classic fashion of working people everywhere--by withholding their labor. At least 500,000 have been on strike for some portion of the last two tumultuous weeks, and, according to Gorbachev, “the situation in some branches of the economy has reached a critical point.”

While the immediate crisis appeared to be easing Sunday, it is not only the short-term economic implications of the unrest that challenge the Soviet leader. The strikes are also dramatic illustration of the political dilemma he faces as he rides the tiger of reform.

While he clearly needs their support if he is to loosen the ties strangling the national economy, Gorbachev has to look no further than a few hundred miles west, where Poland’s Solidarity trade union now shares power with the Polish Communist Party, to see what can happen when a socialist bloc work force finds a legitimate voice.

Awareness of Solidarity

There is no organization comparable to Solidarity here yet. But the Soviet leadership is well aware that it was out of the same kind of seemingly scattered labor unrest in the 1970s that Poland’s independent trade union eventually emerged.

Certainly, the Soviet miners’ strike is a powerful demonstration of collective will--one that apparently startled party leaders and some Western analysts as well by shattering the old image of a mostly passive Soviet work force, too frightened or disinterested to press its own agenda.

By Sunday night, miners in most parts of the country were reportedly going back to work. However, tens of thousands in the crucial Donets Basin were still holding out pending further assurances that the authorities will accede to a long list of demands.

As Gorbachev appealed for their understanding during an unscheduled television interview Sunday afternoon, the Donets strikers watched on three sets specially positioned on the town square.

Workers’ Loss of Faith

Searching carefully for the right words, the Soviet leader said that the workers’ frustration is understandable. They have “lost their faith” in official promises and are impatient with the pace of reform.

“Workers are taking things into their own hands,” he said, “and this, despite the drama of events, inspires me greatly.” However, he added, he didn’t particularly like their tactics. And he warned that “if this situation would continue . . . if the tension would persist and worker collectives in other industries join in, then there would be a real threat.”

Gorbachev promised that the Supreme Soviet, the national Parliament, will today devote its session to the strikes, and by Sunday night a group of miners’ representatives were reportedly on board a train from Donetsk to Moscow so they could make their case in person.

Even if the current wave of strikes does subside, however, it has left behind a potentially significant new group of labor leaders. These leaders have been bolstered by success and have organizations still intact that appear bound to compete for influence both with the country’s traditional, party-controlled trade unions and with local government, party and industrial bureaucrats.

In Siberia’s Kuznetsk coal basin and the Karaganda fields of central Kazakhstan, where more than 150,000 miners have now gone back to work, regional strike organizations have been transformed into workers’ committees, ostensibly to monitor the authorities’ performance in living up to the 35-point program hammered out to end the stoppages.

Miners’ Grievances

Similar committees, selected by the miners, have also emerged at collieries that kept operating throughout the strikes. They are reportedly fielding grievances and acting as arbiters with local officials.

The emergence of these independent committees is testimony to the failures of the official trade unions, which in the Soviet system have become representatives not of the workers but of the industrial and government bureaucracy.

It only seemed odd to Western eyes that during negotiations between a top party official and Siberian strike leaders last week, the head of the official trade union movement, Stepan Shalayev, sat beside the party official, opposite the strikers.

In some cases, representatives of the official unions reportedly joined the protest wave, but even Shalayev conceded in an interview published by his movement’s official newspaper Sunday that the strikes were “also our fault.” Gorbachev thinks so, too, and he has singled out the official trade unions for particular criticism.

The strikers’ demands were another sign of the political implications of the unrest.

Quest for Independence

A central issue was greater economic and administrative independence from the government bureaucracy that now controls the mines. The government was also forced to agree that mines can sell coal produced over quota on the world market, with the proceeds used to directly benefit the miners.

In Lvov, in the western Ukraine, striking miners demanded the ouster of local party bosses, and some called for the establishment of truly independent trade unions.