Most Soviet Coal Miners End Strike : But New Walkouts Break Out in Estonian Ship Factories

Strikes that swept across Soviet coal fields for two weeks dwindled today to scattered stoppages, but new walkouts broke out in Estonia while the country’s legislature debated how to deter future strikes.

In the Donetsk Coal Basin, the country’s largest, local officials said most of the Ukrainian region’s 300,000 strikers returned to work after they heard the results of their strike committee’s meeting with Premier Nikolai I. Ryzhkov.

Ryzhkov sat down Monday with the miners and worked out a “concrete program of actions for the entire country’s coal industry,” Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, said.

In Voroshilovgrad, which is in the Donetsk Basin 550 miles south of Moscow, about 26,800 workers at 47 out of the region’s 93 mines remained on strike, Tass said.

In Estonia, workers at ship-building factories and several other plants struck today to protest recent measures that favor the native Estonian population of the restive Baltic republic, the official Soviet press agency Tass said.

A republic-wide strike committee of non-Estonian workers called the strike Monday, Tass said. It demanded cancellation of a recent law promoting the Estonian language and withdrawal of a proposal to allow only longtime residents to run for local office.

Lawmakers of the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, today debated a statement promising workers that the legislature will “act decisively and effectively to do everything necessary for the strengthening of social stability,” the government newspaper Izvestia reported.

Government concessions to strikers have included promises of pay raises, increased benefits and more economic independence for mines, as well as shipments of scarce food and clothing.

Tass said the strikes in the Donetsk region alone cut coal production by 1.2 million tons and in the western Siberian Kuznetsk Coal Basin by at least 1 million tons, according to official reports.