Next Step : Miners Seek Nothing Less Than a New Kremlin Role : At one time their goals were just economic, but now they want to create a Solidarity-like movement.

It was almost two years ago when a group of miners from this filthy, smokestack-filled Siberian city made their first visit to the magnificent chambers of the Kremlin.

These miners--who had organized the first major labor protest their country had seen in decades--were negotiating in the halls of power. Although clumsy with words and seeming as out of place as a Politburo member would have been in one of their shafts, they had the clear advantage. Half a million men were refusing to go back to their jobs until the government gave them better working and living conditions.

What the miners found in Moscow was a shock: The men who for almost three-quarters of a century had ruled in the name of the Soviet working class had no notion of what the nation’s proletariat really wanted, much less how to deliver it.

That was in 1989. Now, fresh from yet another massive work stoppage, the miners are looking ahead to finally being able to run their own affairs, and even touting a plan to replace those uncomprehending men in the Kremlin with a coalition government styled after the Polish round-table talks which ultimately put the Solidarity movement in power in that country.

“When we went to the Kremlin during the first strike, we quickly learned there was no one there capable of handling the economy and making our lives better,” said Anatoly Malykhin, a cocksure Siberian who is the closest thing this country’s miners have to a spiritual leader. “We saw that the whole structure was wrong.”

That first strike won for the miners government pledges to improve living standards and provide safer working conditions. But despite those promises, many miners and their families are still living in barracks built here 45 years ago for Nazi prisoners--barracks with only two communal toilets for 100 people. More than 600 miners are still killed on the job each year.

So when workers in the Kuznetsk basin of western Siberia launched their second major strike this spring, they set their goals far higher. They skipped the economic demands this time and declared their intention of uprooting the system that has proved itself incapable of giving them a decent life.

For two months, as many as 300,000 miners from the Pacific coast to the Western Ukraine boycotted their jobs--demanding Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s resignation, the abolition of the national Parliament and the establishment of a new coalition government made up of the leaders of the various Soviet republics, democratic movements and labor unions.

Although these specific demands were not met, the coal workers went back to their jobs last week having won independence for their mines, which had been under the control of the central government bureaucracy. The miners remain determined to play a continuing political role at the local, republican, and national level, and according to some analysts, they’ve already turned the tide of Soviet politics.

Before the strike, conservative forces in the Soviet Union appeared to have gained the upper hand. A progressive 500-day plan to move to a market economy was spiked by conservatives and Gorbachev himself. Several top liberal advisers or allies of Gorbachev were fired. Soviet troops and police cracked down in the Baltics, killing unarmed citizens, and Gorbachev proposed harsh new measures to restore order.

“Without the strike there would have been a crackdown,” said a Moscow-based Western diplomat who is an expert in Soviet labor movement. “It would have been back to the freezer--the end of perestroika.

“It sounds dramatic, but it’s perfectly true,” added the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. “When conservatives began to see real mass participation in the strike and that the miners’ tenacity was having an effect on the rest of the labor force, they realized that the democratic movement was not only a movement of small groups of intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad.”

Moreover, this time, unlike in 1989, the miners were not alone. Two brief strikes at dozens of large Byelorussian factories, a brief labor action in the Ukraine and a symbolic one-hour work stoppage across Russia showed for the first time that the democratic movement has a broad base among blue-collar workers.

“It’s no longer just a miners’ movement--it’s a workers’ movement,” Malykhin said. “And it’s very organized. That was demonstrated by our strike. When the strike started, some regions had only economic demands, but we in the Kuzbass (Kuznetsk basin) had only political demands. Within two weeks, we were all united behind the political demands. Then workers in other industries started supporting us.”

By launching their strike when they did, the miners gave the radical leader of the Russian Federation, Boris N. Yeltsin, the support he needed going into a crucial session of the Russian Parliament, where conservatives were planning to call for his resignation.

Yeltsin “owes his survival to the miners,” said another Moscow-based Western diplomat, also speaking on grounds of anonymity. “It’s likely that without the strike he would have lost his job.”

“The miners became Yeltsin’s army in the streets,” she said.

Yeltsin returned the favor by providing the miners with a way to end their strike with dignity, although their ambitious demands were not met. Playing the perfect politician, Yeltsin, a Siberian himself, came to the Kuznetsk to plug a proposal to transfer the mines to Russian jurisdiction and give them economic independence.

The miners view Yeltsin with more skepticism than do the Moscow intellectuals, office workers and students who mass by the hundreds of thousands to chant the Russian leader’s name. But they have nevertheless thrown their support behind Yeltsin’s bid to become the first popularly elected president of Russia.

“We’ll work with him as long as his policies suit us,” said Alexander Y. Kolesnikov, a member of the Kuznetsk strike committee. “We don’t think he’s anything more than a man for the transition period, but so far we can work with him.”

Yeltsin’s success at bringing an end to the strike, which began in March and virtually paralyzed the country’s metallurgical industry, is likely to do a lot for him at the polls on election day, June 12.

But the strike’s effect is likely to far exceed its impact on Yeltsin’s presidential bid. Like Solidarity in Poland, the miners are not content with mere labor reform. They’ve been to the Kremlin, and, in their opinion, saw that the Communist emperor has no clothes. Now, they want to enact their vision of how the country should be run.

When it became obvious that Gorbachev was not going to quit or the national lawmakers disband, as the miners had been demanding, Malykhin and a handful of other strike leaders even designed their own plan for a new government structure that would gradually take power.

“We are forming an inter-parliamentary group that is called the Assembly,” Malykhin said. “It was my idea. I modeled (it) on the European Parliament.”

Leaders of the republics that want to stay in the Soviet Union and representatives from labor unions and democratic movements would form the round table, Malykhin said. Yeltsin--himself promoting the idea of a round table--has endorsed the idea of a coalition government taking power from Gorbachev and the national Parliament.

Although the Soviet labor movement has some parallels with Poland’s Solidarity, there are also great differences. The Soviet movement does not have the allegiance of intellectuals and the church, as Solidarity did.

Some leaders of the movement are doubtful that a strong, united labor movement like Solidarity is possible in the Soviet Union now, when the overriding trend is toward greater autonomy for the republics.

“Solidarity was different,” said Yuri Y. Bolderyev, a leader of the miners’ movement in the Ukraine’s Donetsk basin, the nation’s No. 1 coal field. “They were able to consolidate around a nationalist ideal. They all shared a hatred of Communists and Russians. We don’t have anything like that to unites us.”

But other miners say their movement has the potential to do what Solidarity has done--put a labor leader into the highest office in the land.

“We already have our (Lech) Walesa--Malykhin,” Yegor Zorkin, another member of the Novokuznetsk strike committee, said with a smile. “Now we have to keep on developing our Solidarity.”

Malykhin, known for his unconventional ideas and colorful speech, stole the political spotlight with a speech at an emergency session of the Russian Parliament a little over a month ago. Dismissive deputies talked loudly and clapped derisively when Malykhin took the podium. But he soon had their rapt attention.

“The workers’ movement used to be saddled,” Malykhin told them in an angry, forceful voice. “But don’t take us for an old, gray obedient horse.” He blasted the lawmakers for being too passive about most everything, including the strike, and apparently won many of them over to the miners’ cause.

“Until the problem of power is solved, there can be no economic transformations,” he said. “Only by destroying the current pyramid can we start economic reforms.”

There’s nothing in Malykhin’s background that would single him out as a likely political leader.

Like the forebears of many others who toil in the Kuznetsk, his parents were deported to Siberia for political reasons under Josef Stalin. Malykhin’s father worked 35 years underground. A rarity in this male-dominated job, his mother also worked in a shaft for three years.

“I always knew I would work in the mines,” the 34-year-old Malykhin said. “There was always the feeling that I was a very small person, and that politics and management was something big people did. I never thought I’d be involved in politics,” he said. “But circumstances pushed me into it.”

Malykhin said it was not by chance that the miners started the labor movement.

“It’s natural that the labor movement started with the miners, because our work is collective,” Malykhin said. “Every time we go down into the shaft we know that our lives depend on each other. The danger binds us together.”

Since the 1989 strike, leaders of the Kuznetsk miners have concentrated on organizing the rank and file at each pit and ridding their coal-rich region of Communist Party influence. The party used to have cells at every mine, but they have all been abolished.

The party, which used to be the only real power structure in the country, has also been pushed into the background in the politics of places like Novokuznetsk, the largest city in the Kuznetsk with a population of almost 700,000.

The workers committee--known as the strike committee during walkouts--has taken over many of the functions that the city government cannot handle here. Men who have spent their lives chipping away at coal veins deep underground now find themselves trying to oversee municipal affairs as a sort of parallel government.

“Our local government officials work very ineffectively,” said Yuri R. Zhuk, 44, a member of the Novokuznetsk workers committee who has been a miner for 11 years. “We need to be involved in all areas of community life, from making sure food and consumer goods reach our stores to solving our acute housing problem.”

This requires uncommon tactics. Getting a new home for a miner’s family can mean intimidating some bureaucrat into finding an apartment he claims does not exist, or having miners build it for their comrade themselves.

“Why does the work committee have so much power here?” Zorkin asked. “Because it’s the last organization in which the people still have some faith.”

The work committee threatened to arrest miners who failed to follow safety precautions--even though it has no legal police power. Still, “everyone was so scared that they immediately started obeying the rules,” Zorkin said. “We have very unconventional means that ignore all the red tape the bureaucrats get stuck in.”

The work committee’s next big challenge will be to help the miners decide what kind of ownership they want for their mines now that Yeltsin has pledged to give them independence. “We have no experience in this,” Kolesnikov said. “We have to find lawyers and economists to help us.”

Meanwhile, the miners of the Kuznetsk see their ultimate goal in simple terms. “We know that the only way to improve our lives is to change the system,” said Valery S. Stepanenko, 27, as he prepared, helmet in hand, to enter a shaft at Zyrnovodskaya mine. “And I will go on strike again if I have to. We are determined to live like human beings.”