Coal Strike to Force Closures in Other Industries, Soviets Warn Miners : Economy: Blast furnaces at steel plants are being shut down. But leaders of the walkout say they will not yield.

The Soviet government warned Sunday that major segments of the country’s already staggering economy are on the brink of closure because of the growing shortages of fuel, power and materials resulting from a three-week strike by coal miners.

Serafim V. Kolpakov, the minister of the Soviet metallurgical industry, said that blast furnaces are being shut down around the country as steel plants run out of coking coal and that this will have a quick impact throughout the Soviet economy.

But neither he nor Mikhail I. Shchadov, the coal minister, gave any indication in their brief television interviews that the government was ready to meet the miners’ economic demands, which include big pay increases and better living conditions, not to mention their insistence that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev resign.

The walkout began March 1 and more than 300,000 miners are now on strike at 165 mines across the country, according to reports by the independent Postfactum news agency. The protest has halted production at more than half of the mines in the Soviet Union’s four major coal fields.

Strike leaders said Sunday that the miners will not yield, that they believed the government will not negotiate seriously unless there is a grave threat to the whole economy.

“The general mood is to stand firm,” said Viktor Osovsky, a member of the strike committee at the Donetsk Coal Basin in the Ukraine. “They have not even begun to respond to our demands. We will wait.”

In the Kuznetsk Coal Basin of Siberia, the strikers also rejected government pleas to return to work, saying they will stay out at least until Thursday, when the Russian Federation Congress of People’s Deputies meets in Moscow.

The impact of the strike reaches far beyond the metallurgical industry, a major consumer of coal, to those segments of the economy that require steel and other metals, ranging from automobile production to construction to home appliances.

“There is no industry that does not consume metal,” Kolpakov said on “Vremya,” state television’s nightly news program. “The production of machine tools is stopping now as well as other production in other industries. . . .

“Our respected miners must understand the situation in the country and not aggravate the situation to the extreme. They have to return to work and help restore the economy. Then we will return to their concerns.”

Urging the strikers to return to work, Shchadov warned that many mines still operating could also be shut down because of the lack of electricity to run them and the lack of maintenance work to ensure their safety.

Other mines are facing bankruptcy, he added, because they could not meet either their contracts or their payrolls.

The shortage of coke, which is produced by superheating coal to remove the gases, has also slowed the manufacture of chemicals, mineral fertilizers and sugar, and the closure of the blast furnaces has sharply reduced residential heating in a number of cities, Kolpakov said.

Soviet industry is receiving only 220,000 of the 340,000 tons of coke it needs daily to operate efficiently, according to Soviet officials, and the amount is diminishing with work now halted at more than a quarter of the country’s 600 coal mines.

Industrial production was already expected to drop 15% to 25% this year because of the country’s overall economic problems. Government officials fear that the miners’ strike could have a devastating impact far beyond their intention.

Anatoly Tuleyev, chairman of the regional soviet, or governmental council, in the Siberian mining center of Kemerovo, appealed Sunday to Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin to ask the miners to return to work for the good of the country.

“This has gone too far,” Tuleyev said in a telegram to Yeltsin. “The coal problem affects the entire country. . . . A chain reaction is leading to the paralysis of the entire economy. I get hundreds of telegrams. Children in kindergartens and patients in hospitals are freezing. One cannot read them without pain.”

Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov said Saturday, “If the (strike) continues, even to the slightest degree, then all of us, including the miners, will have to work for several years to repair the damage.”

Calling on miners to return to work today, Pavlov warned, “The country is in a critical position. . . . This is the result of taking our political ambitions into the economic sphere.”

Pavlov, apparently referring to Yeltsin and other radical politicians who have strongly supported the miners, continued: “There are people who pretend to be representatives of the miners’ interests but turn out to have been to mines just on an excursion or perhaps never at all.

“Can you believe people who say they fight for your interests, but at the same time put the interests of the people and of the country itself at stake? There is nothing sacred for such people. They will betray you tomorrow like they betray others today.”

He said he would negotiate with the miners if they dropped their political demands and agreed to return to work.

“We are not promising them hills of gold--we know we do not have any,” Pavlov said. “But we say that we will do what we can. Just let us find realistic ways together to do this.”

Although miners are among the best workers in Soviet industry, the conditions in which they work and live are appalling. The miners say that the government has failed to honor the promises it made after an earlier strike in July, 1989.