n502  2226  04 Feb 81
BC-MINERS-2takes-02-05
    By David Satter
    (c) 1981 Chicago Sun-Times (Field News Service)
     DONETSK, U.S.S.R. - A fine rain washed the Donetsk streets. The air
was heavy with a smoky mist as a group of miners gathered slowly at
the bus stop across from the Butovka-Donetsk coal mine after working
the night shift.
    ''We all know about Poland'', said a Donetsk miner standing in the
faint light of a street lamp,'' but what can we do about it. We are
for the Polish workers, but if they attack Poland today, tomorrow it
can be us.''
    IRST DAYLIGHT REVEALED THE BLUISH OUTLINES OF THE SLAG HEAPS IN
THE DISTANCE, BUT THE DAY SEEMED TO HOLD LITTLE PROMISE FOR THOSE WHO
LIVED IN THE TINY, WHITE COTTAGES IN THE NEARBY MINER'S VILLAGE OR
WORKED BEHIND THE WALLS AND CATWALKS IN THE DEEP UNDERGROUND SHAFTS
OF THE Butovka mine.
    Alexei Nikitin, a former engineer at Butovka, helped me speak with
the miners here. In four days of talks at bus stops, in the barren
parks outside mines and in communal flats with water dripping from
the ceiling, it became clear that all the conditions that led to
worker unrest in Poland exist in more extreme form in the Soviet
Union.
    The vulnerability of the individual miner in the Soviet Union could
be compared to that of a worker in the old U.S. company town, where
the lone corporation also controls the law enforcement agencies.
    The mine directors are chosen by the local Communist Party
committee, which also selects the judges, city officials and state
prosecutors who also enforce the labor code.
    In Donetsk, therefore, mine directors have close ties to everyone to
whom the worker might turn for recourse.
    Mine directors can exercise enormous control just by being the
designated representative of the Soviet state. Their power is
magnified, however, by the fact that the mine management controls not
just the work pace, but, to an appreciable extent, living conditions.
The distribution of separate apartments, for which miners may wait in
communal flats for as long as 25 years, is completely in the hands of
the directors, who with impunity can push one name ahead of the other
on the waiting list, leading to genuine anguish as people who have
waited most of their lives for separate apartments are passed over
year after year.
     The administration also decides who receives prized vacation
packages for a few weeks by the sea once in 10 to 15uyears. It also
decides if a miner may be on the waiting list for such relative
luxuries as a car or some types of furniture and carpets. Mine
officials also must support applications by a mner for cr1edit at the
local stores. Mine and factory directors and all local legal and
government officials are united by a common interest, insofar as the
latter are members of the party, which is seeing to it that every
enterprise fulfills the plan. The grim work in the mines is organized
with this one goal in mind, regardless of the wishes or interests of
the miners.
    Under these these circumstances, abuses take place not because the
law is repressive or because it doesn't exist, but rather because no
one has an interest in seeing it enforced. The official trade unions
are subordinated to the mine management. Although they can defend
miners accused of drunkenness of truancy, they do not defend those
fired for insisting on their formal rights.
    Miners at Butovka said that although they formally are required to
work only a five-day week, plan fulfillment is impossible on a normal
schedule and Sunday long ago became a regular working day. In
November, Butovka miners worked all five Sundays, and, in violation
of the rules, were paid double time for only two of them. They said
anyone invoking his formal right to refuse overtime work would be
fired immediately.
    Officials juggle shifts so a miner often works three different
shifts in the course of a month. Compensatory time off has to be
taken only duri
7g hifts when equipment is being repaired, regardless
of when it was earned. The mine assigns time off in rigid accordance
with the needs of production rather than in response to miner's
requests.
    There probably would be dissatisfaction with the conditions under
which Soviet miners work, even if they guaranteed a high standard of
living, but the discontent is aggravated by the fact that for many
miners, the reward for their labor is meager.
     Many miners in Donetks go home to crowded communal flats. In one
apartment I visited, a man who lost his legs in the mine 40 years ago
sleeps in a communal kitchen while his retired wife and their son,
who also works in the mine, share a shabby adjacent room in an
apartment with no running water.
    MORE
    
nyt-02-05-81 0126est
***************

n503  2232  04 Feb 81
BC-MINERS-1stadd-02-05
    x x x RUNNING WATER.
    Five or six Soviet families share the modest English surburban
houses built before the revolution for the families of British mining
specialists.
    In the wake of two unsuccesful grain harvests, the housing problem
has been aggravated by food shortages. In the line at a dairy
products store near the Butovka mine, people said that milk supplies
run out by midafternoon and complained of shortages of cheese and
eggs. The state meat store did not even bother to open for the day,
but stood padlocked, its empty counters visible through a window.
    In this situation, miners in another country might strike for better
conditions, but the miners in Donetsk hesitate even to discuss any
collective action because the system that has evolved in the Donetsk
mines over the years has left them convinced that, unlike the Polish
workers, they cannot count on the solidarity of the working class.
    The the guarantee that there will be no collective action by workers
in the mines is management's success in engineering a split in the
work force. According to a well-established Soviet practice, for
every job in the mines except the most menial, there is a model
brigade made up of ''udarniki'' or ''achievers'' who are chosen for
their loyalty to management and who receive the best equipment, first
access to materials and spare parts and the best conditions.
    The system bolsters the invulnerability of management because it
creates a highly paid, privileged group of up to 25 per cent of the
work force that, in exchange for its privileges, will back management
in any confrontation.
    The plan target in the mines is set not on the basis of any working
average, but on the performance of these model brigades. Miners with
inferior equipment and conditions are unable to meet the target and
the result is enourmous disparities in pay, which at Butovka have led
to fights in the wooded area outside the mines.
    The ''achievers'' prove their loyalty by appearing at party meetings
where they make animated speeches demanding higher work quotas, fewer
days off, and greater efforts to overfulfill the plan.
    The ''achievers'' may carry attempts to curry favor to the point
where they begin to make loud, pro-Soviet political statements in the
mines when members of the administration are present. But they return
to their former their previous tone of voice when the directors have
left.
    The division of the work force into two mutually watchful and
distrustful parts demoralizes the workers and greatly strenghthens
the hands of management, leaving it free to deal individually with
dissenting workers.
    This is why the workers I met expressed little hope of Polish-style
free trade unions appearing in the Soviet Union, citing history and
the gloomy feeling that comes over Donetsk when a gray mists settle
over the city and the tops of the slag heaps are hidden.
     END
    
nyt-02-05-81 0132est
***************

n531  0253  06 Feb 81
BC-NIKITIN-02-06
    EDITORS: The following is a companion piece with MINERS, moved on
Thursday's wire.
    By David Satter
    (c) 1981 Chicago Sun-Times (Field News Service)
    DONETSK, U.S.S.R. - A challenge to the management of a Donetsk coal
mine is so rare that 11 years after Alexei Nikitin dared to risk one,
he is still remembered by the miners at Butovka-Donetsk with a
mixture of astonishment and regret.
    A mining engineer and former member of the Communist Party, Nikitin,
42, can, in many respects, be compared to Lech Walesa, the leader of
the Solidarity trade union in Poland.
    Nikitin's efforts to defend his fellow workers, however, had very
different consequences from those of Walesa, because he operated in
the Soviet Union, and in his long odyssey through Soviet prisons and
mental hospitals, he refused to accept what others take to be the
inevitable consequences of that fact.
    Nikitin's difficulties began in December, 1969, with a single act
whose consequences have shaped his life to this day. In response to
distress among the miners, Nikitin led a group of workers to see
Viktor P. Savitch, director of the Butovka mine, to complain that no
bonus was being paid for extra coal which was produced as a result of
Sunday work.
    The complaint was rejected contemptuously and Nikitin and 129 miners
reacted by sending a collective letter to the Communist Party Central
Committee in Moscow. The letter was referred back to the Donetsk
party and Nikitin was fired in February, 1970. The majority of the
other miners were forced to renounce their signatures. Unable to find
work but convinced he had done nothing wrong, Nikitin went repeatedly
to Moscow to appeal his dismissal in the reception halls of the
Supreme Court, the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet procurator, and the
central committee of the Communist Party.
    In the tense reception halls where every complaint is under
surveillance and anyone can be seized for a ''conversation'' with the
admitting doctor at a mental hospital, Nikitin met many other ''truth
seekers,'' as they have been known for centuries in Russia, who had
come to Moscow from all over the Soviet Union.
    Nikitin's experiences over a period of two years proved to be
typical. He was referred from one official organization to another,
obliged to fill out new and ever more numerous forms at every stage,
only in the end to be referred to the organization where he started,
which claimed to have no knowledge of his case.
    Many truth seekers slowly begin to understand that their complaints
will never be answered and return home to despair, but Nikitin said
he could not accept that there was no hope of final justice, and on
April 15, 1979, he entered the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow with
appeals intended for the United Nations and the World Federation of
Labor.
    He was seized in Moscow on the street a short time later and taken
to a psychiatric hospital for a short time before being sent back to
Donetsk where he was arrested Jan. 13, 1972, and taken to Donetsk
prison. He was pronounced mentally ill in his absence and in June,
taken to the Dnepropetrovsk special psychiatric prison. Nikitin said
that, judging by all external indications, 85 percent of the inmates
at Dnepropetrovsk were sane. He met a Soviet soldier who, while
serving in Egypt, had tried to cross the border into Israel;
Ukrainian nationalists; Baptists who had distributed leaflets, and
worker dissidents like himself, including Vladimir Klebanov, who
tried to organize the Soviet Union's first independent trade union in
1977.
    The inmates were treated with sulfizine, a powerful behavior
modification drug, which causes prolonged, agonizing convulsions. The
treatment continued for months until the patient showed signs of
complete physical and moral submission.
    Nikitin was freed in March, 1976, after four years at
Dnepropetrovsk, and returned to Donetsk where he moved in with his
sister. Despite repeated attempts, he was unable to find a regular
job.
    Unwilling to accept his helplessness, Nikitin finally returned to
Moscow, and Feb. 22, 1977, entered the Norwegian Embassy and
requested political asylum. The request denied, Nikitin was seized
when he left the embassy and placed under arrest and sent back to
Dnepropetrovsk. He was again ''treated'' with massive doses of
behavior modification drugs during three further years of confinement
until his release in May of last year.
    I met Nikitin in Moscow last autumn, shortly after he had been
examined by Anatoly Korygin, a Kharkov psychiatrist, who had
pronounced him completely sane.
    Intrigued by his story, a colleague and I travelled to Donetsk Dec.
5-8 to speak to Nikitin about his experiences and also to meet other
miners who were willing to talk about conditions in the mines.
    The opportunity was an important one. Although hundreds of visits to
mines and factories are arranged every year for foreign
correspondents by official Soviet organizations, there are relatively
few possibilities to talk to Soviet workers under normal conditions.
    On Dec. 12, three days after we left Donetsk, Nikitin was arrested.
He vowed before we left that if arrested he would begin a hunger
strike and that, if placed in a mental hospital, he would not allow
himself to be treated with behavior modification drugs. His present
whereabouts are unknown.
    END
    
nyt-02-06-81 0553est
***************