n078  1400  20 Dec 77
 
AM-WORKER
By DAVID K. SHIPLER
c. 1977 N.Y. Times News Service
    MOSCOW - A former coal miner who organized a group of workers to
protest corruption and hazardous job conditions was reported Tuesday
to have been seized by the police and placed in a psychiatric
hospital. Other members of his group were said to have been picked up
by the authorities and held for short periods since they conducted an
unprecedented news conference three weeks ago with American
correspondents.
    The miner, 45 year-old Vladimir A. Klebanov, was apparently arrested
Monday about 2:30 p.m., taken to a Moscow police station and then
committed to Moscow's psychiatric hospital No. 7, according to
Aleksandr Podrabinek, who heads a dissident group monitoring
psychiatric abuses.
    Podrabinek said that this was a hospital for transients, and he
assumed Klebanov would be transferred out of the capital. The miner
has already spent a total of 4 and a half years in mental
institutions because of his protests.
    Dissent by ordinary workers is highly unusual in the Soviet Union.
The vast majority of human rights activists are well-educated
scientists and writers who have little contact with or understanding
of the working class, and whose activity has failed to deal with
workers' grievances relating to living standards, food shortages and
the like.
    This contrasts with the link between workers and human rights
advocates that has existed in Poland, for example, where events have
apparently been watched with some trepidation by Soviet authorities.
    Such a link was nearly established here in recent months when
Klebanov approached Dr. Andrei D. Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who
won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize for his defense of human rights.
Sakharov told some newsmen that he had refused to get involved with
the miner because he was afraid that some of the workers who had
signed opened letters did not fully understand the risks of open
dissent. He told others that he doubted Klebanov's commitment to
individual liberty.
    In fact, neither Klebanov nor several other workers who gathered in
a Moscow apartment three weeks ago to talk to reporters seemed to
share the views of the human rights activists. They were not trying
to change the Soviet system, but were simply outraged at what they
saw as injustice.
    Klebanov had been a shift foreman in a coal mine, where he had
worked for 16 years, he said. The men were forced to work 12-hour
shifts instead of 6 to meet the production plans, and as a result
their fatigue caused accidents. In his mine alone, 12 to 15 people
were killed a year, and 600 to 700 injured, he said. Yet officials
tried to keep the casualties secret and refused to eliminate the
causes, he claimed.
    His protests brought him dismissal and then commitment to mental
institutions, a common fate of those who complain, he said.
    Among other workers in his group were a waitress in a Volgograd
restaurant who said she was dismissed for complaining about her
superiors stealing crockery, an engineer from Yerevan who was scolded
and downgraded for reporting funds paid for work never done, a
locksmith from Moscow who asked for a raise and was dismissed when he
persisted, and a housing maintenance man from Klimovsk who was
dismissed after trying to expose the use of factory money for drunken
parties.
    The workers said they had met each other while pursuing their claims
in the reception rooms of the central committee of the Communist
Party, the Supreme Soviet and the prosecutor's office. They said that
100 or more people are in those rooms every day with similar
grievances.
    By the end of November, Klebanov had collected the signal7r denouncing ''th-
e
groundless repressions'' and ''the plundering of people's dignity,
the measures of terror used in an attempt to frighten honest citizens.
    
1220 1700pes
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