Promises Do Little to Ease Harsh Life of Ukrainian Coal Miners : Soviet Union: Workers shocked the Kremlin by staging an industrywide strike. Now they have turned to the ballot box to press their demands.

Rats run free, broken timbers jut out of the darkness and men stand in mud, breathing bad air, stripped to the waist. That’s how it is in a Ukrainian coal mine, 1,500 feet below ground.

The men of the Trudovskaya mine say life on the surface isn’t much better. Their shoddy housing has no running water and the stores have little to sell.

Many die early, killed by accidents, cancer or black-lung disease. They retire at 50, if they live that long.

Thousands of miners in the Ukraine, and in the Siberian coal fields of the east, shocked Mikhail Gorbachev’s Kremlin and the economy last summer with the first industrywide strike.

Eight months and countless promises later, the original bread-and-butter demands have become political.

After a month of rallies and hunger strikes against the local Communist Party leadership, Ukrainian miners handed the party a stunning setback in elections March 4.

“Look how I live!” said Nikolai Golik, 36, who has two children. “Our conditions are not much better than down here in the pit. There is no gas, no hot water.” He said they didn’t even have an indoor toilet.

Sergei Malchenko, 26, shares his comrade’s bitterness.

“Gorbachev is showing off,” he said. “He is not doing anything. I didn’t go vote because I don’t want to play those games. Nothing good will come of it. For 72 years, Communists have been pulling our legs, and finally have mucked it all up. I won’t help them. Not me.”

The Trudovskaya mine is one of 21 in this eastern Ukrainian city of 1.2 million people. In it, 3,500 miners work six-hour shifts around the clock to meet a yearly quota of almost 1.5 million tons of hard coal.

Andrei Slivka of the Donetsk strike committee said working conditions have barely changed in his 19 years underground.

In the shaft, sections of wall show signs of caving in. Broken timbers protrude in all directions. Muddy water is underfoot everywhere.

Poor-quality wood brought in to prop up the shafts breaks easily. Hastily built scaffolding often is flooded and slippery, so miners must jump from board to board.

Rats lurk in the flickering light of miners’ lamps, waiting for a chance to snatch leftovers from lunch.

On the surface, the temperature is 41 degrees Fahrenheit. In the shaft it is 77 degrees.

Men dig with shovels, drills and picks. They crouch, squat and crawl to scoop up coal in a narrow tunnel too low for them to stand straight.

Sweat pours down their faces in black streams.

There is an alarm system to warn of explosive gas, but miners suspect it doesn’t work. An explosion at the Pochenkov mine in same coal basin killed 13 miners and injured more than 20.

Boris Grebenyuk, who visited the United States in January with several other Soviet miners, said it would be much easier to work there than in a Donetsk mine.

“We saw humane treatment and a real concern for the workers,” he said after visiting a mine in West Virginia.

Few statistics are available on accidents and occupational illnesses in the nation’s largest coal field, known as the Donbass.

Yevgeny Mironov, the acting regional Communist Party leader, acknowledged the accident rate was “unfortunately rather high.”

He blamed “shortcomings in working conditions” in the 55 miles of underground tunnels, and carelessness by miners about safety rules.

Miners who stopped to talk blamed their problems on the Communist Party apparatus.

Donetsk is better off in some ways than many Soviet cities, even though sugar is rationed, the stores have no cheese or fresh meat and fruit is rare in winter. The men sometimes are given meat at the mine, and milk and yogurt are plentiful.

Vodka also is plentiful, but there are few clothes, televisions, refrigerators or cars for sale.

Most workers live in one-story duplexes, built in the 1940s and 1950s, that need constant repair and have no modern conveniences. As in much of the Soviet Union, there are not enough new apartments and the waiting lists for better housing are long.

Sergei Stolika, 62, continues working 12 years beyond the retirement age because he can’t get by on a monthly pension of 170 rubles.

Nikolai Tsuprik, 27, earns 550 rubles a month, more than twice the pay of the average Soviet worker, but said: “What can I do with them? There’s nothing to buy in the shops.”

Vladimir Burdo, 50, said: “I have two daughters. One of them is married and has a child. We all live together in a 48-square-meter flat. You call that life? We need new people in the regional party committee.” The size of the apartment is equivalent to 500 square feet.

The Communist Party district leader, Nikolai Nikandrov, got only about 3,000 votes, or 3.4%, in the Ukrainian legislative elections March 4. Two miner candidates got the most votes for the seat.

Another loser was Vladimir Ivantsov, party leader at the mine, who supported the men’s demands and appeared to have their respect.

“I’m not sorry I lost the elections,” Ivantsov said. “People didn’t vote against me, but against the apparatus, the system that keeps it afloat.”

Workers want more say in management and greater autonomy for the mines.

“We can’t set wholesale prices as we wish,” Ivantsov said. “We can’t decide ourselves where to sell our production. We can’t buy what we really need, even for production development.”

Such problems in the mines make the social problems on the surface all the worse, he said.

When miners held rallies and demonstrations to force the regional party leadership out, Ivantsov supported them but stopped short of endorsing a strike.

Mironov, the acting regional party leader, said he felt victimized by the mistakes of those who went before him.

Voters “don’t want to understand we are quite different” from previous party leaders, he said, “but it is our lot to be called to account for the mistakes made before us.” He rejected demands for his resignation.

Yuri Makharov of the city strike committee said he was in no mood for compromise:

“They must resign,” he said, “not because they are personally responsible . . . but because they are part of the system and we are out to crush that system.”