28.10.1999

Russian workers fightback

The assault began at 2am on October 14. It was carried out by a 30-strong detachment from the elite ‘Typhoon’ unit of interior ministry special police, wearing their trademark balaclava hoods and armed with kalashnikovs, pistols, tear gas and cudgels. Their target was not a terrorist incident or a prison riot, but a paper factory that for the last 18 months has been occupied and run by its workers. Their mission, in the words of Grigory Dvas, deputy head of the Leningrad regional administration, was “to cleanse the territory of those who illegally took over the mill and prevented the true owners from running it”.

At first the operation went smoothly: the ground-floor windows of the administration building were smashed and the worker-guards on patrol were bludgeoned to the ground. But the ‘heroes’ of ‘Typhoon’ had not reckoned with the courage and resourcefulness of the workforce. Within minutes, alerted by a shrill blast from the factory locomotive’s whistle, some 600 workers ran from their homes and converged on their plant. Faced with this overwhelming mass, the invaders lost their nerve, grabbed seven hostages and retreated to the second-floor canteen, where they cowered behind a makeshift barricade. In the course of the ensuing stand-off, two workers were shot and all the hostages badly beaten, but in the end the police were withdrawn and the factory remains (for the time being, at least) a ‘people’s enterprise’ in the hands of the workers.

The ongoing story of the Vyborg pulp and paper mill is worth telling, because it has much to teach us about the real nature and impact of privatisation and ‘capitalism’ in post-Soviet Russia. Situated in the Sovietsky settlement (Vyborg district, Leningrad region), the factory not only gives work to around 2,160 local people, but also provides the residents of Sovietsky with electricity, hot water and central heating. In Soviet times it produced more than half the Leningrad region’s requirements for a range of paper products. Since the fall of the USSR it has had three owners, all of them foreign investment companies.

The first company, American Cellulose, evidently cherry-picked the mill’s most accessible and valuable assets, ran it into the ground and then auctioned it off to its second foreign owner, the Cyprus-based Nimonor Investments in 1996. The new owners promised to maintain the existing workforce, pay some £5 million of wage arrears and tackle the accumulated £50 million of federal tax debt in order to put the plant on a viable footing. None of the promises were kept. Nimonor was just another asset-stripper, with an eye on the mill’s machinery. In February 1998 the workers effectively locked out the Nimonor management, occupied the works and democratically elected their own plant director. Production resumed some 14 months ago.

In the meantime, a controlling interest in the factory was bought from Nimonor by Alcem UK Ltd, a shadowy London-based company with links to the alcohol and aluminium sectors, both of which are among the favourite territory of the Russian mafia. It was on behalf of Alcem that the ‘Typhoon’ squad, backed up by the acting governor of the Leningrad region, Valeriy Serdiukov, and the deputy head of police for the Leningrad region, Yuriy Gavrilov, launched its action. An almost identical assault took place on July 9 this year, following Alcem’s failure to bribe the workers’ leaders into calling off the occupation, and ended with similar results. Alcem’s two listed directors are both British, one of whom, Bryan Webb, would only say: “I am not the right person to talk to about this” (The Times October 15). His comment strengthens the suspicion that Alcem is just a front company for other business interests, perhaps in Russia itself.

A number of factors made it possible for the Vyborg workers successfully to resist the state’s latest attempt to restore their factory to its ‘rightful’ owners: intense local support from the entire population of the Sovietsky settlement; a strong work collective, whose sense of solidarity has been deepened by the experience of real democracy and control in the workplace; consistent support from local and regional unions; and finally, the strategic border location of Sovietsky itself - straddling the main ‘Scandinavia’ highway and close to the principal rail link to Finland. Last year’s ‘rail wars’ have made the authorities fearful of the disruption to trade and transport that can be caused by workers’ blockades of vital arteries.

The future of the Vyborg mill is now in the hands of a state commission and the law courts. The workers themselves are trying to launch a legal challenge to the initial privatisation, which they claim sold the plant to American Cellulose for a ridiculously low price, only 12% of which was ever actually paid by the buyer.

In so far as they reported it at all, our own media concentrated on the difficulties for western capital which the case highlights. The Independent’s Moscow correspondent, Helen Womack, for example, bemoans the “wild environment” for foreign businessmen and the fact that “Alcem now risks losing its investment”. She informs us that “only under president Boris Yeltsin ... were foreigners able to buy the factories that had failed under communism” (October 15). These remarks contain some entirely characteristic distortions. In the first place, Alcem’s “investment” represents little more than a gambling chip intended to facilitate a classic asset-stripping exercise, whereby the plant’s machinery and land will be flogged off and the workers cast out to fend for themselves. Secondly, Womack’s implicit suggestion that the Vyborg mill was a Soviet “failed” enterprise is simply untrue.

As even a superficial survey of the matter will reveal, talk of ‘the restoration of capitalism’ in Russia is highly misleading. Capitalism in the accepted Marxist sense - ie, the purchase of labour-power in order to extract surplus value from the production of goods and services and their sale - seems to be the exception rather than the rule. True, there are a number of showcase ventures funded by reputable western companies, like the Coca-Cola bottling plant run by Inchcape in the Urals, and Procter and Gamble’s domination of the market in hygiene products (both cited by Womack), but the overall experience of privatisation has been quite different. For the old ruling elite and the new mafia, privatisation provided a means of effortless self-enrichment. The majority among them lack the knowledge, experience and flair to engage in real capitalist entrepreneurship, and given the fact that, under Yeltsin, wholesale theft, fraud and corruption have been so easy, it is hardly surprising that the relatively risky business of making money from production has been eschewed in favour of the fast bucks to be made from criminal enterprise. In any event, it is difficult to speak coherently of capitalist relations of production in an economy still dominated by barter, where millions of workers go unpaid, and where the currency hardly constitutes real money at all.

Politically, as the Vyborg case illustrates, workers’ collective efforts to protect themselves from the depredations of foreign and domestic exploitation are still largely confined to economic struggles. Their main demand, that the mill should be returned to state ownership, while on the one hand making a correct demand that the authorities, not the workers, should pay for the failures of the market, on the other is in fact driven by nostalgia for old certainties. This demonstrates that the experience of democratic control of production by the direct producers themselves has still not imbued them with sufficient confidence to look at a more radical, political approach to their situation. This is in part a reflection of wide-scale, and understandable, disillusionment and cynicism with politics in general. Certainly, anyone who imagines for a moment that struggling workers can look to the ‘official’ Communist Party of the Russian Federation for support is living in a dream world.

There is, however, another case in which a struggle fought by Russian workers initially over economic demands has borne much more promising political fruit, a case in which the reactionary role of the CPRF is also fully exposed. The town of Yasnogorsk (Tula region), south-east of Moscow, has a population of some 20,000 and is dominated by the Yasnogorsk machine-building plant (YMZ), employing some 4,200 workers. Here the course of post-Soviet privatisation was different from that in Vyborg. YMZ became a joint-stock company, with a majority of the shares being held by the workforce itself.

In the face of chronic bureaucratic mismanagement and incompetence by the old administration, retained after YMZ’s change of status, and in response to the acute suffering caused by wage arrears, in September 1998 the workers of YMZ held a general meeting at which they voted to dismiss the existing management. Two workers were democratically elected as directors and the factory became in effect a real workers’ collective, with a factory committee exercising democratic control over production, sales, finance and wages, and at the same time doing its best to ensure that Yasnogorsk as a whole was fed during the hard winter of 1998-9.

The workers’ initiative was opposed at every level by the CPRF-dominated regional authorities under the governor, Vasily Starodubtsev, a leading member of the party at national level. With the backing of the CPRF, the old administration used the law courts to have YMZ declared bankrupt as a prelude to removing the workers’ committee and resuming control of the plant. A month after the ‘Workers’ Collective Soviet’ took control, the two directors were arrested and held in prison for two months, where their health rapidly deteriorated. The soviet’s chairman, Andrey Guan-Tin-Fa, was hauled before the regional prosecutor and threatened with long-term imprisonment if he did not use his influence to call off the occupation. Another militant member of the YMZ soviet, Vladimir Kuznetsov, was visited by officers of the FSB (formerly the KGB) who threatened him and his family.

Anger over the imprisonment of the directors Dronov and Roschenia and the campaign of threats and intimidation against other workers’ leaders finally boiled over in December 1998, when some 10,000 people, half the town’s population, led by the workers of YMZ marched to blockade the main railway line to Moscow. Declaring, “This is our revolution”, the workers launched a general strike calling for the release of the imprisoned directors and pressing a range of demands. The YMZ soviet became the core of a protest movement and established links with other strike and workers’ committees across Russia, and with the embryonic revolutionary proletarian organisations that are crystallising around the strike movement.

For months there was a tense stand-off, with repeated attempts by the ‘communist’ authorities to break unity between the YMZ soviet, the workforce and local people, but all to no avail. The breakthrough came in July this year, when the eight-month strike and protest ended with a real victory for the workers. Under the terms of an agreement drafted by the YMZ soviet, all the workers’ demands in regard to wage arrears, pay increases and conditions were met in full, and work was resumed under a new management structure which gives the workers’ committee the power democratically to control the plant administration. As a statement from the Moscow Union of Marxists, a group of left radicals, put it, “It is an unprecedented case hardly imaginable not only in Russia but in any developed country of the world.”

Certainly this victory was notable, but it is also fragile. Nobody can expect the Yeltsin regime or, for that matter, an administration led by the CPRF to accept such an outcome in the long term, because Yasnogorsk represents a dangerous example of what workers can achieve, even under Russian conditions. In some sense, the extremely violent approach taken at Vyborg can be seen as a response to this threat to the stability of the new ‘capitalist’ property relations.

The most heartening aspect of the Yasnogorsk case is that the YMZ soviet and workforce have drawn clear political conclusions from their experiences over the last year. They intend to stand a workers’ candidate, on a revolutionary socialist platform, in December’s elections to the state duma. As a spokesman for the YMZ workers put it,

“It will be difficult to win the election. The lack of money is the biggest problem - bourgeois candidates have everything; we have nothing except for ourselves. But we will challenge them and do our best to win this small battle in order to make the next step on the road to revolution”.

Michael Malkin