vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #159 / Social life / Reading article...

Workers waving Communist flags and red banners blocked the Trans-Siberian Railroad tracks near Vladivostok Jan. 27 in an effort to get Moscow's attention and receive their back wages.

Denouncing krai and state officials and even their own union leaders, some 1,000 miners, shipyard welders, electricity workers and others gathered to shake a fist in the faces of those responsible for the non-payment of wages estimates at 1.1 billion rubles ($183.3 million) in wages.

"This is an action of anger and protest, but it cannot solve the real problem," said Vladimir Chubai, head of the Primorye Federation of Trade Unions. "We should change the criminal code to punish bosses who don't pay their workers' salaries."

The unpaid wage crisis is one of national dimensions. President Yeltsin promised to to settle wage arrears by the start of this year. On Jan. 19, he rebuked his government -- particularly Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin and his two first deputies, Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemsov -- for failing to do so.

The railroad protest was largely symbolic. Unlike a similar demonstration last summer that led to a shoving match between workers and cops, workers agreed to gather during a break in the train schedule. A quarter-mile long row of miners' buses and cars heading to the tracks received a police escort, and squadrons of police who had shown up in case of trouble stayed inside empty passenger cars parked a few hundred yards away.

Yet anger and despair were close to the surface. Oleg Pavlov, a retired military officer, waved a sign with a cartoon of Yeltsin and other political leaders sitting in the palm of a giant Uncle Sam. "Let's protect our lives from democratic bloodsuckers," the sign read.

"We don't have any democracy," Pavlov said. "This is anti-democracy. This is a genocide of the Russian people."

"It's anarchy! Anarchy!" interrupted Mikhail Khan, who waved a red and blue flag emblazoned with the hammer and sickle.

Khan, a miner, said there will soon be another revolution in Russia because unpaid wages are enraging the proletariat. Florid with rage, he shouted so loud he drowned out the voice of the protest organizers over the bullhorn nearby.

"What kind of a government is it that can't take care of its own people, can't feed them?" Khan said.

Victor Novikov, 42, an Arseniev miner who works for Primorskugol, said he has received only wages of 350,000 old rubles ($58.33) since July. His wife hasn't been paid in three months.

"I don't know how to feed my children," he said. "There's no breakfast at school anymore. Sometimes children start bleeding from undernourishment and also from the cold."

Some of the signs held by protesters were simply plaintive: "Save Lipovtsy from Hunger and Cold, Sirs," begged one. But others were angry at their strike organizers for conducting a largely symbolic protest. The crowd should have really blocked trains, said Tamara Korsakova.

Korsakova, who lives in the village of Bolno-Nadezhdinokoye, where the strike was held, said everyone knows the trains take a break around noon, when the protest gathered.

"There is absolutely no effect to this demonstration," she said. "If the train was standing here, we would shake the railroad. Maybe somebody important from Moscow would be on the train. Then the message would get through."

Sergei Malykin, 38, a miner at Tavrichanka Mine No. 5, said he and his family survive by buying food at a store that accepts credit from miners. The store charges three times the rate of a normal shop, he said. They also have a cow, and when it gave birth to a calf, there was milk. They slaughtered the calf for meat.

Malykin said he showed up simply to make a statement, not because he thought 1,000 workers could change the situation.

"I don't really hope for anything," he said. "I have to rely on myself."