Yeltsin Vow to Pay Miners Ends Strike

Spending lavishly to cut short a nationwide coal miners’ strike, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin on Saturday promised the industry more than $2 billion--enough to nudge disgruntled workers off their picket lines.

Nearly all the striking miners resumed work Saturday, union leaders reported, ending a two-day protest that had shut down about two-thirds of Russia’s coal mines.

To outsiders, the government’s concessions sounded modest enough: Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin merely pledged that miners would receive their full salaries every month. But in a nation where millions of workers receive their wages late or not at all, the promise of prompt paychecks was a tempting offer indeed.

Union leaders said they will give the government a month to come through with the cash. They vowed to renew their strike March 1 if they are not satisfied.

The coal miners are not alone in demanding their due. Thousands of teachers walked off the job last week, hoping to force the government to pay them last fall’s wages. In St. Petersburg, university employees staged a hunger strike to call attention to their plight. Air traffic controllers and some factory workers are also threatening to strike.

With presidential elections five months away, Yeltsin recently unveiled a vague plan to take care of the nationwide salary crunch by creating a huge “social fund.”

He promised that the account would have enough money to cover one month’s salary for every Russian citizen--but offered no hint of where he would find the cash.

Such freewheeling promises may win over impoverished voters, but they alarm some economists.

“The president has made a serious mistake by announcing that he knows how to take care of the problem of unpaid wages and that there is money” in the federal treasury, said Yegor T. Gaidar, the former acting prime minister.