Striking Miners Get Short Rations at Talks in Moscow : Soviet Union: Prime minister focuses on sausages, avoids wage and political demands. Gorbachev stays away.
After more than a month on strike, 400,000 Soviet coal miners are angry enough to want President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s head on a platter. But all Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov was ready to talk about at a negotiating session Tuesday was adding sausage to their daily food rations.
Representatives of the striking miners went to the Kremlin for what they were told would be negotiations on their demands for doubled wages and for the resignations of Gorbachev and the national Parliament.
“As we guessed, no concrete steps toward deciding our problems were made at the meeting,” Pavel Shushpanov, chairman of the Independent Miners Union, told a news conference.
The strike organizers were angry that Gorbachev, who has yet to meet with miners, did not come to the negotiations, and they demanded that he attend talks scheduled for today. But they received no promise from Pavlov, who began the meeting by setting guidelines for discussion.
“Pavlov declared, ‘We will not consider any political demands here,’ ” Alexander Sergeyev, deputy chairman of the miners’ union, told reporters.
“The most important question in this meeting turned out to be the miners’ breakfasts,” Sergeyev added in disgust.
The 30 representatives of the striking miners at the meeting told Pavlov that they had come ready for compromise but that the government’s list of items to be negotiated was not acceptable.
“We, with all seriousness, warn that (resolution of the) economic issues alone, without the political issues, will not solve the problems in the coal industry, nor in the country as a whole,” the striking miners said in a statement at the meeting with Pavlov.
They repeated their demand for the resignation of Gorbachev and the dissolution of the national Parliament for “failing to warrant the confidence of the people,” and they called for a coalition government to be formed to replace them.
Pavlov said the best he could offer would be a step-by-step increases in wages “in close linkage to the growth of production,” the official news agency Tass reported. The miners have demanded that their wages be doubled now and increased later in relation to inflation.
Now a month old, the strike has reached most of the country’s coal fields and has cost the economy millions of tons of coal. An estimated 400,000 miners have joined the strike.
Vladimir Z. Mukishev, a deputy from the national Parliament and a representative of the pro-government labor federation, said after the session that future talks will also include pensions and improvement of equipment supplies for miners. He told the independent news agency Interfax that Pavlov did not seem to take a “tough stand.”
As Pavlov negotiated with the miners in an attempt to bring peace to the Soviet economic scene, the hard-line leader of the Russian Communist Party declared a temporary truce with Boris N. Yeltsin, the populist president of the Russian Federation, the country’s largest republic.
“Let’s agree on the fact that the situation in Russia is serious and our duty is to stop disintegration in all spheres of Russia’s life,” Yegor K. Polozkov, the party’s first secretary, told a meeting of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, the federation’s Parliament.
“But I think it would not be timely,” Polozkov continued, “to change the leadership, the chairman, his deputies, the presidium or any other bodies.”
After Polozkov’s speech, deputies voted on whether to include in the agenda a vote of no-confidence in Yeltsin, and only 121 of more than 800 deputies in the hall supported it.
The Congress will continue today, and a no-confidence vote could still be taken, although it is unlikely.
More to Read
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.