Miners’ Anger Grows Along With Shortages : Soviet Union: Thousands are quitting the Communist Party. The so-called workers’ party ‘has never done anything for us,’ they charge.

Miners spend their days off waiting in line for as long as 24 hours to fill up their Zhiguli compact cars with gasoline. Televisions, refrigerators, washing machines and other household appliances almost never appear in the stores of this southern Ukrainian coal mining city.

And with each product that disappears from the shelves, the proletariat’s anger toward the Kremlin and local Communist Party functionaries grows and grows.

The workers who have been courted by the Communist Party since before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution are turning in their party cards by the thousands and denouncing the ideology that they and their predecessors were told would ensure their freedom from exploitation. Calls for workers to return to the Communist fold and promises of a brighter future now fall on deaf ears.

The Kalinin Mine in Donetsk is still decorated with the socialist slogans “Glory to Labor” and “Long Live Miners.” But the attitude toward such slogans, and toward the Communist Party in general, is evident in the miners’ unabashed criticism of the country’s entire leadership--and especially of the party.

Miners who massed in mining centers across the country last week in a one-day strike to demand the resignations of Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov and his Cabinet chanted, “Down with the party!” and “Down with the government!”

Away from the crowd, their anger was just as loud and clear.

Dima Ustinov, a 28-year-old miner covered from head to toe with coal dust, stood in the sunshine and said the Communist Party is to blame for the country’s dire economic straits.

“As their slogan says, ‘The People and the Party are One,’ so of course the party is responsible for the country’s economic crisis,” Ustinov said sarcastically. “They call it the workers’ party, but it has never done anything for us.”

The 28th Communist Party Congress, which concluded Friday, was nothing but “animated cartoons,” Ustinov said.

Said Yuri N. Belayev, 41, party boss of the Kalinin district of Donetsk: “The workers think, ‘Who’s been running the economy for all the years?’ The answer is easy--the Communists, so naturally we’re at fault.”

About 70 workers at Kalinin were so frustrated that they quit the party before the congress. Many more are expected to drop out this week. Officials at the mine’s Communist Party committee were told to pack their bags and close their office at the mine.

“The party is strong when the people, not only its members, trust it. That trust is gone,” Belayev said. “The government must take much more decisive measures to improve living standards and feed the people.”

The popular sentiment toward President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose reform programs have failed to improve living standards, is better than the attitude toward the party, but it still ranges from lukewarm to frigid.

“I think Gorbachev is a man who talks a lot and doesn’t do anything,” said Seriozha Niktyuk, 28, a coal miner from Makeyevka, a dreary, mid-size city near Donetsk. “We see him on television, but we don’t see results in our daily lives.”

Miner Vladimir Verchenko, 35, joined the party soon after Gorbachev came to power in 1985 because he saw in the general secretary a man willing to change the country from the bottom up.

“I believed in him,” Verchenko said. “I thought simple workers should do something so the party went in the right path.”

But in the last few years, he has changed his mind and now complains that the country’s leader drags his heels on difficult economic decisions.

“Gorbachev doesn’t do what he needs to do,” Verchenko said.

But while the working people all but unanimously denounced the party, the Kremlin chief still has fans.

“If Gorbachev hadn’t done what he has done, we couldn’t even stand here and complain openly about the problems,” miner Anatoly Kazarenko, 44, said as he listened to anti-government speeches at a rally during the coal strike last Wednesday.

“In a year or two, this mess will sort itself out,” Lyuda, a 42-year-old grocery clerk who declined to give her family name, said.

Some people blame the local party bosses and government leaders and praise the central government.

“I fully support Gorbachev and Ryzhkov,” said Alexandra Yanchyuk, 66, a retired cashier. “But I don’t trust our local officials.”

Holding a duck, webbed feet and all, that she had just bought for dinner, Yanchyuk added, “They cannot keep our stores stocked because they cannot stop corruption in the supply system.”

A meat counter in a large Donetsk grocery store was full of jars of powdered drink mix. The fish section had about a dozen frozen fish and cans of seaweed.

The most interesting section in the store was the counter where private entrepreneurs could sell their products, but prices there go from high to outrageous. A pair of jeans cost nearly a month’s salary for miners, who are highly paid.

When asked where to find cheese in Donetsk, a taxi driver said sarcastically, “What’s that?”

Salespeople in several stores in Donetsk and Makeyevka confirmed that cheese, which had been a regular item until two years ago, has now all but disappeared.

“It’s a real crisis situation,” said Victor Shershun, 30, a Donetsk miner. “Without a doubt, it’s worse than it was during the strike just last year.

“We have to stand in line for gas for at least 24 hours,” he added. “We bring blankets with us and sleep in our cars.”

The Kalinin mine’s chief engineer said that, in the end, the government suffers for not fulfilling the promises it made to the miners to coax them back to work after last summer’s crippling coal strike. The workers’ anger over the government’s failure to improve their lives translates into low productivity at the mines.

“They work much worse. Discipline is lagging,” Nikolai Chelyak, the chief engineer, said. “Before, they felt responsible to work six hours if they had a six-hour shift, but now they think nothing about working for an hour and then leaving.

“We never had problems fulfilling the plan before,” Chelyak said. “But now we’re basically going bankrupt.”