BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
Millions of Russian workers participated in a nationwide strike March 27 to protest sharply declining economic conditions. It was the largest strike against the government since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the New York Times reported. Nearly 100,000 people gathered in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and there were protests in more than 1,200 other cities. Although the government had officially approved the rallies, the Interior Ministry deployed 16,000 cops in Moscow alone.

Russian authorities said 2 million workers attended the demonstrations, while Mikhail Shmakov, a trade union official, asserted that 20 million joined the protest for back payment of wages and pensions. Millions of workers have gone unpaid for months. "Our patience has blown up," declared Ivan Ivanov, a retired shipyard worker who hasn't received his pension in three months.

At least $10 billion is owed to workers and pensioners. One week before the protest, the government paid $263 million in back wages to workers in the defense industry. The regime also paid millions to teachers the day of the strike.

"Every day we face the same basic struggle: not to die from hunger," said Tatyana Tytiokhova, a teacher in Ulianovsk. She last received her $53 monthly salary in December. "It's an embarrassment. Our wages are unpaid, the classrooms are cold and run-down. We would starve if each spring my parents did not go out and tend the family garden plot." Tytiokhova participated in a walkout during the first week of March with teachers from seven other schools in the town, which is 1,000 miles east of Moscow.

Economy continues to deteriorate
Economic conditions in Russia continue to deteriorate. This is reflected in the birth rate, which dropped from 17 births per 1,000 residents in 1985 to just nine per 1,000 in 1996. Demographers estimate the population will sink from 147 million to 123 million people over the next three decades.

While capitalist investors continue their "hunt for the Siberian Tiger economy," as one bourgeois paper put it, Russia's gross domestic product dropped 6 percent in 1996, the fifth decline in as many years. Industrial investment plummeted 18 percent last year, while some $20 billion of domestic capital fled the country. An article in London's Financial Times reported that "$60 billion had flowed out of Russia over the last five years and that capital was continuing to leave at a rate of $12 billion a year." Capital flight from Russia was 10 times greater than the amount of foreign direct capital invested last year.

In one example of capital flight, the U.S.-based General Electric announced plans to shut down its Moscow distribution company in April, after tax officials seized its bank account in October to collect taxes the company claimed it had paid.

In his first major speech in nearly a year, Russian president Boris Yeltsin vowed on March 6 to crack down on tax evasion by regional governments and state enterprises. "Listen to my warning," he bellowed. "You have to abide by the law whether you like it or not." Yeltsin's address was partly a response to pressure by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which suspended a $10.1 billion loan twice after demanding reversal of falling revenues. Officials of the imperialist lending agency announced April 3 they would reinstate the loan on the condition that Yeltsin follows through on his pledged crackdown.

There is, however, mounting resistance to tax payments by industrial enterprises and local governments. Nikolai Sevruygin, then-governor of Tula, threatened in early March, "If by next week we don't get money to pay our salaries, we will no longer deliver any taxes to Moscow."

Moving to battle this defiance, Yeltsin appointed Anotoly Chubais as first deputy prime minister March 7. Chubais, described in the big-business press as the "most hated public figure" in Russia, is Yeltsin's point man to press for capitalist reforms. Upon taking his new post, Chubais pledged to step up war against so-called tax dodgers and officials of regional governments for exacerbating social tensions. The appointment of Chubais was "eagerly anticipated" by imperialist investors, who view him as their key person for pressing attacks against the working class and moves to reestablish capitalist property relations.

Chubais headed Moscow's privatization program in the early years of Yeltsin's administration. At that time, Washington and other imperialist powers advised the Russian president to impose "shock therapy" against the workers, including wholesale plant shutdowns and the elimination of food, rent, and other price subsidies. Other entitlements such as education, pension, and health benefits would be slashed.

Resistance to market `reforms'
One of the latest "reforms," reducing housing subsidies, was rejected by Valery Shantsev, deputy mayor of Moscow. "No matter what they [the federal authorities] do to us we will not implement it [the housing reforms]," he stated. Former finance minister Boris Fyodorov warned that cutting the housing subsidy "is a very dangerous thing. There will be a protest."

Shantsev dismissed pressure from Chubais to enforce the housing plan. "Chubais could be sacked tomorrow," he noted referring to January 1996, when Chubais was fired from his post as deputy prime minister by Yeltsin.

Another sign of the obstacles to more capitalist measures is Moscow's reluctance to crack down on the Avtovaz auto factory, the largest carmaker in Russia, which owes $500 million in taxes and penalties to the federal treasury. The main plant employs 111,000 workers and the company provides a range of services including kindergartens, clinics, and other social benefits, highlighting the social relations that exist under the workers state. While tax authorities have initiated bankruptcy proceedings against many enterprises, including Avtovaz, closing down the company with forced bankruptcy would trigger a massive social upheaval.

Meanwhile, IMF officials are also prodding the Yeltsin regime to end the state monopoly in other core aspects of the economic system such as railways, oil transport, electricity generation, and gas supply. Expressing his willingness to acquiesce on these and other imperialist demands, Yeltsin said on national radio after his March 20- 21 summit with U.S. president William Clinton, "I am aware that my opponents reproach me for not being tough enough at the negotiations. Of course, we could have knitted our brows and pounded the table with our shoes as happened during the cold war years. But what would we have achieved? Another round of irreconcilable enmity, a new isolation for Russia."

As Washington steps up its war preparations against Moscow through its drive to expand the NATO military alliance up to Russia's border, the Clinton administration also moved to isolate the neighboring Stalinist regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus. Lukashenko, an outspoken opponent of NATO expansion, has pushed for reunification with Russia, a popular policy in this country of 10 million people sandwiched between Poland and Russia. Officials of Russia and Belarus signed an outline of a union treaty April 2 that pledged closer cooperation in military, economic, and social matters, although most of the details were left open. The treaty fell far short of the Belarus government's hopes for a full monetary union.

The U.S. government announced it was halting $40 million in aid to Belarus after Serzh Alexandrov, the U.S. embassy's first secretary in Minsk, was expelled March 24 for provoking violent clashes with riot cops. He was participating in a protest of 10,000 people. After the expulsion of Alexandrov, the White House ordered Vladimir Gramyka, the Belarussian first secretary and consul, to leave the United States March 26.  
 
 
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