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Occupation of a Nuclear Plant Signals Anger of Russian Workers

By Michael Spector, New York Times, 7 December 1996

[M] OSCOW -- More than a dozen employees at St. Petersburg's nuclear power plant took over the control room on Thursday and threatened to shut down the plant that provides most of the city's power unless they received months' worth of back pay. On Friday morning, 400 of their colleagues joined the protest, and announced a hunger strike. Federal officials rushed to the scene to assess the hazard.

By noon Friday, the Russian government had flown more than a billion rubles -- $200 for each worker - to the plant and promised to deliver the rest within a week.

"They are right to protest," said Georgi Kaurov, the spokesman for Minatom, the Russian Nuclear Agency, after the workers agreed to leave the control room. "They haven't been paid, and they should be paid. You can't argue with that."

The crisis at the nuclear plant was at least temporarily resolved, and there was no evidence that the workers intended to seriously endanger the public. But as this incident suggests, it can take extreme measures to get paid in Russia these days.

Friday, as coal strikes across the nation entered their fourth day and the government conceded that the country's workers were owed nearly $9 billion in back pay -- and that the debt is growing by almost 20 percent a month -- Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin faced an angry mob in Parliament.

"Many want magic solutions by simply printing new money," Chernomyrdin said in an address in which he attempted to lay out an economic recovery plan for the coming year. He said it was time to move to a "survival" economy and that "starting the presses would be death to our economy."

He may be right, but the season of dark and cold has returned, and the workers of Russia are tired of promises -- most made by President Boris Yeltsin during his election campaign -- that have never been fulfilled. Many workers have not been paid for months. Others are paid in the merchandise they manufacture -- from carton loads of tampons to crates full of textiles, or eggs or match boxes.

"The state is bankrupt, the president is ill, the government is helpless and the Duma is powerless," said the Communist leader, Gennady Zyuganov, who lost the presidential election to Yeltsin on July 3.

Zyuganov asked the Cabinet to draw up a new budget more generous to the dispossessed. That, however, would almost certainly make the situation worse for the people who need help the most.

The problem is stark but simple: There is not enough money to pay workers, mostly because tax revenues have been worse than anemic this year. Everyone agrees that the social safety net - always shabby for the majority of the people - has rarely been thinner.

But simply delivering buckets of cash, which would mean a dangerous surge in inflation, would make money even less valuable than it is now.

Yeltsin, who is recovering from heart surgery, announced Friday through a spokesman that he intended to deal with the wage arrears problem as a matter of first priority when he returns to work later this month. If nothing is resolved soon, his government will almost certainly find itself in an ugly battle with the Communist-dominated Parliament.

Chernomyrdin has faced enormous criticism for his inability to resolve the wage problems as winter approached. He has also been ridiculed for his responses to queries about the government's position on helping the poor.

As he approached the Parliament Friday, Chernomyrdin was presented with a religious icon by an elderly woman.

"It was a hint that Christ also promised to feed people with five loaves of bread," the commentator Stephan Kiselyov wrote in Saturday's editions of the newspaper Izvestia. "Unlike the government of Russia, however, Christ usually lived up to his promises. Of course that was because he made miracles. It would have been even a bigger miracle if the Parliament had adopted the budget."

It didn't. Instead of rejecting the budget completely however, which would have started an official challenge to the government that could end either in its dismissal or the dissolution of Parliament, the members put off the measure for a week.

"Why do we have to be in a hurry?" asked nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has actually supported the bill. "A holiday will pass, people will get some rest and calm down."

Dec. 12 and 13 are holidays in Russia, and many people will be on vacation in the coming week. Yeltsin has said he will report back to work on Dec. 25 -- a normal work day here -- and most of his opponents in Parliament are eager to see what shape he will be in. He has taken no part in any of the economic planning since winning re-election.

Parliament rejected the Cabinet's first spending plan in October and Thursday it was discussing a revised draft prepared by a special reconciliation commission.

Deputies have complained that the spending plans do not take adequate account of the poorest members of Russia's increasingly unequal society -- those who lost out under market reforms.

Chernomyrdin said that inflation has dropped in the past four years from 2,000 percent to 22 percent a year. He said the government would reach a 5 percent growth rate this year, although he did not explain how. Last year, Chernomyrdin predicted even stronger growth. Instead production fell by more than 10 percent from the previous year.

"Our economic prospects are not unclouded," Chernomyrdin said Friday. "But they are not hopeless."