 Yuri Maltsev |
Under a motley collection of placards, banners, and hammers and sickles, an estimated 3,000 people gathered on the city's central square Oct. 7 to protest wage arrears and to demand a change in the course of reforms that have promised much and yielded little for the average Primorian.
"Seven years! For seven years you've been carrying out reforms!" said Vladimir Borochenko, a retired major general from the Union of Soviet Officers. "And what do we have to show for it?"
Organized by the Primorye Federation of Trade Unions as part of a nationwide day of protest, demonstrations, around the krai, fell far short of the 300,000 participants that had been predicted. Nikolai Kostyukov, deputy chairman of the Primorye Federation, said upwards of 6,000 people had converged on Vladivostok's main square, although authorities estimated half that number participated.
Protesters, disproportionately gray-haired and dressed in Brezhnev-style suits, included unpaid factory workers, underpaid doctors, and hundreds of pensioners. Midway through the protest, students from Far Eastern State University carried to the front of the crowd a coffin draped in red with the words "Higher Education."
"Look at the holes we've fallen into," 19-year-old student Marina Rubintsina told the crowd. "Look at the people on their knees. Your children will live worse than you do. Is that what you want?"
Though wages and presidential impeachment were the central issues for the day, some participants lamented declining living standards and reduced purchasing power in the wake of the ruble's devaluation. Even those who are up-to-date on their pay, such as teachers, were angry.
"They only pay us 490 rubles [$30.63] a month," said Alevtina Grigoryseva, a 52-year-old teacher. "In order to earn the same salary, a teacher has to teach twice as much."
To cries of "Down with Yeltsin!" Federal Duma Deputy Vladimir Grishchukov detailed a list of impeachment charges the Duma is preparing against President Yeltsin. He also called on protesters to continue demonstrating round-the-clock until their demands were heeded.
"Let this be the beginning of an endless protest," Grishchukov cried. "Let us stand here until the end."
The crowd burned Yeltsin in effigy and voted in a show of hands to call for his resignation.
Though labor leaders had predicted that strikers might spontaneously block roads and rails, law enforcement authorities said there were no reports of such actions.
According to the federation, in Primorye, 135,000 workers are unemployed, and wage arrears total 1.7 billion rubles. Social service payments, like child support and unemployment payments, are in arrears of more than 800 million rubles.
Speaker Lyubov Sizikh, secretary of Primorye's branch of the All-Russia Bolshevik Party, lashed out both at the regional administration for sending representatives to the protest. While First Vice Governor Konstantin Tolstoshein glowered from the crowd, she called the regional officials "masters of hypocrisy, saying they're going to participate in this protest."
Beatific pictures of Stalin and Lenin, along with caricatures of Yeltsin and his cabinet, lined the fence around the city's Monument to the Fighters for Soviet Power in the Far East.
"Comrades, recall how in June 1941 the Soviet people stood as one against the German fascists and prevailed," one poster read. "Why are you, descendants of those heroes, kneeling with your hands outstretched to the new invaders and wolf men? Where is your pride? Where is your power? All power to the soviets!"
Though employers owe back wages to hundreds of thousands of workers, the participation levels were comparatively low in Vladivostok. Raisa Kramarenko, 49, a cook, stood in the doorway of her canteen and watched hundreds of Dalzavod ship repair workers parade down the city's main boulevard to the square.
She hasn't been paid in four months, she said, and her husband hasn't received his wages in two years at the household maintenance company where he works. They survive off food they grow at their dachas.
But while she supports the strikers, she said, she had to work. "What else can we do?" Kramarenko said. "We need to live."
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