More than 1,000 incensed workers from regional defense industries gathered on the city’s Central Square July 8, demanding payment of back wages and the government’s resignation, and threatening violence should their calls go unheeded.
Along with public sector workers and 300 cadets from the Far Eastern State Maritime Academy, workers from factories and shipyards, representing the backbone of Primorye’s economy, listened to firebrand speeches castigating President Boris Yeltsin and reformers Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov. Speakers blamed krai Gov. Yevgeny Nazdratenko, Vice Gov. Anatoly Tolstoshein, and Mayor Viktor Cherepkov for the ongoing wage crisis, as well as the widespread water and energy shortages afflicting the krai.
“Stand Nazdratenko, Tolstoshein, Cherepkov, and commanders of the Pacific Fleet! Stand here and be accounted for! Answer for the destruction of our defense industries and our living conditions!” shouted Galina Morozova of the krai branch of the All-Russian Women’s Union.
Arriving from a smaller demonstration of public sector workers held at City Hall, Federal Duma deputy Svetlana Orlova was met with jeers, curses, and whistles as she tried to address the crowd.
Today’s protest was the culmination of 15 days of demonstrations by workers from Bolshoi Kamen’s Zvezda shipyard, which repairs the Pacific Fleet’s atomic submarines. Shipyard workers had camped in a nearby field and protested daily outside the krai administration wearing hard hats and radiation symbols pinned to their jackets. They chanted slogans, banged their hats in cadence, and berated passing krai duma deputies.
Earlier in the day, Zvezda workers formed a 200-foot long corridor leading up to the krai building, forcing krai government workers to walk through and listen to workers’ complaints
“The government has admitted the pernicious nature of these reforms, but we aren’t guinea pigs on which to experiment,” said Bolshoi Kamen krai deputy Ivan Rogovoi. “I can tell you that the indignation has come to the critical point: Tomorrow, it’ll be stones and the day after tomorrow, it’ll be weapons.”
Rogovoi said at the krai duma’s next session he would introduce a resolution from deputies demanding Yeltsin’s resignation. Similar resolutions have been passed in recent weeks by dumas in Yaroslavl and Ryazan.
Protesters at the meeting also announced the formation of a civil tribunal made up of duma deputies, lawyers, Pacific Fleet officers, and labor leaders, to judge Yeltsin’s government for “crimes and genocide against the people.”
Olga Skripko, chairwoman of the Zvezda shipyard trade union, threatened that if wages aren’t paid by the end of July, factory workers, along with miners, would blockade the krai’s main highway and the Trans-Siberian railway.
She scoffed at the 5 million rubles ($830,000) that had been transferred on July 7 from the Ministry of Finance to shipyard workers, some of whom haven’t been paid since 1996. “What’s 5 million rubles to them? Kopecks!” she said. “That won’t buy them even a slice of bread!”
Two hours before the protestbegan, krai police and bomb squad members responded to reports of a bomb being placed in a trash can,some 300 meters from the Central Square. Police spokesmen were unsure if the threat was related tothe protest.
Adding to workers’ ire are widespread water and electricity shortages, the result of work stoppagesby Primorye coal miners and electrical-generating-station workers.Some sections of the city have been without electricity for several days. Recent rains have not alleviated the drought, which is limiting water supplies to many city residences to a few hours daily, if at all.
By Mike Eckel
Valentin Trukhanenko
Demonstrators from Primorye’s defense industries demand Yeltsin’s resignation.
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