Millions of Russians Protest Unpaid Wages

In threadbare coats and bad temper, millions of long-unpaid state workers across Russia took to the streets Thursday to denounce the Kremlin for reforms they say have ruined the country.

The one-day strike that idled schools, transportation and factories across the vast federation was believed to be the broadest labor unrest since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, even though it fell far short of a predicted 20 million marchers and widespread disorder.

Elderly pensioners and disgruntled workers carrying Communist slogans and the odd portrait of late dictator Josef Stalin plodded through the protests, their rage overwhelmed by resignation.

“Our people are too passive and long-suffering for demonstrations to get out of hand. You will never see the chaos and anarchy of Albania here,” observed Sergei Trush, director of an aircraft construction lab, as about 2,000 protesters ambled through this once-secret city about 25 miles southeast of central Moscow to demand the ouster of President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Zhukovsky, a closed military-industrial enclave during Soviet days, was once a haven of elite engineers and scientists accorded the best that the Communist Party system had to offer. But as research funding and production orders have dried up in the market era, the town and its educated inhabitants have endured a harsh reversal of fortune.

Crowds gathered in hundreds of towns and cities to demand payment of more than $9 billion in wage arrears. Although turnout figures differed drastically, at least 2 million people employed by state factories and local governments were believed to have put down their tools for the protest.

In what was probably the biggest of the crowds that swept eastward across Russia’s 11 time zones, tens of thousands trooped to Moscow’s Red Square amid a huge police presence. The protesters brandished the hammer-and-sickle flag of the Soviet Union and demanded a return of “red power.”

“This column is moving from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad, and it cannot be stopped by government reshuffles that have fooled nobody,” Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov told the docile rally.

But the capital’s downtrodden who turned out for the march were far outnumbered by affluent younger Muscovites who took advantage of the crisp, sunny day to flee to the countryside for an unexpected midweek respite at their dachas.

While the widespread strike illustrated the staggering number of Russians suffering through the transition to a market economy, more telling may be the number who expressed their tacit acceptance of the new order by their absence.

“What does all this racket do to change things? Nothing,” said 75-year-old Zoya Ivashenko, a retired nurse who happened by the Zhukovsky rally while running errands.

Others took pride in the fact that Russia’s oppressive history serves to bridle violent outbreaks, if not vitriolic emotions. And they seemed to find a reassuring boundary to their worries that poverty and unemployment could still get worse.

“We must shout against the indignities foisted upon hard-working people in this country, where only bandits are getting richer. But everyone knows--even in the heat of emotion--that violence would only increase the suffering,” said Yuri Abramov, a 64-year-old design engineer. “We want to find a way out of the disorder, not create a new one. We just don’t know how to do that.”

The marches, organized by Russia’s powerless trade unions, spurred a few sops from the leadership on the eve of the strike, including a promise to pay off half the debt owed to pensioners and students by the end of this month, a ban on expensive foreign-car purchases from government coffers and a visit to the roiling Kuznetsk Coal Basin by First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly B. Chubais.

Only six of more than 100 Kuznetsk mines shut down for the strike--a sign that the Kremlin’s damage-control action may have been effective.

Many Russians are beginning to recognize that overdue wages and pensions are a substitute for higher unemployment; the backlog is mostly blamed on declining state income and tax revenues that are the result of the near-collapse of industrial production. Rather than lay off idle workers and close factories and research facilities that have too few orders, the government holds up pay envelopes.

Russia currently has official unemployment of 3.5%. But with half the labor force still working for the state--at least on paper--underemployment is the bigger problem.

Statistics suggest that one-third of Russia’s approximately 150 million residents live below the poverty line, yet consumption has grown exponentially in the post-Communist era.

“We used to be a people who lived with dignity,” said Inna Ivanova, another aviation designer. “But now we have a country where teachers don’t get paid, doctors don’t get paid, science and industry have been ruined. Only the criminals are succeeding. This is not democracy.”