The making of a trade unionist
ARMENIA / BELARUS the Azeri militias with arms and equipment. The borders with Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan (an Azeri enclave between Armenia and Iran) are the scene of sporadic fighting, mainly by paramilitaries. There is no discernible opposition to the war, no belief in the possibility of a solution and in Armenia as under Moutalibov in Azerbaijan, the government is widely criticized for not doing enough for the war effort.
With the social changes in the ex-Soviet
IN MAY this year a group of union officials from countries resulting from the process of economic reforms, most of the regimes the former Soviet Union attended the educational that now exist will probably prove transitocentre of the Canadian Autoworkers Union. Among ry. The Armenian National Movement them was Nikolai Belanovskii, the vice president of the
(ANM) currently in power evolved from
Union of Auto and Agricultural Machine Workers of the Karabakh Committee formed as a
Belarus (formerly Byelorussia).
result of popular mobilization in 1988.
Now, the ANM is made up of intellectuals
The interview with Nikolai, the first part of which who were outside the old regime and forwe publish below, was given to David Mandel on mer Communist cadres who have rallied to
May 23, 1992 in the course of the visit to it. At the start, its main aims were for the unification of Karabakh with Armenia, and the closure of the nuclear power station and of the "Nayrid" chemical factory just outside Yerevan which is the cause of much pollution.
Shifting attitudes to Russia
When Ter-Petrossian came to power in
August 1990 after direct elections, the mood in Armenia was strongly anti-Russian. At the same time he was faced with a threat from Gorbachev to disband the militia groups. Unlike Gamsakhurdia, the former president of Georgia, or the Azeri
Popular Front currently in power in Azerbaijan, which are trying (or tried) to break their links with the Soviet Union's succesor, the CIS, Levon Ter-Petrossian tried to take a positive attitude to the Soviet authorities and subsequently to Russia, aiming to avoid direct confrontation.
The new elite in Yerevan were also in favour of a diplomatic solution to the
Karabakh question. For this they were ready for a compromise to keep Karabakh as an autonomous region within a federal
Azerbaijan. ANM leaders know that pro- market reforms, which rest on the hope of foreign investment, require stability. But military developments have overtaken political scenarios. The ANM also had to abandon its ecological stand. Nayrid was closed for a year but then reopened. "The struggle for Nayrid was a political question for us", said Ter-Petrossian, meaning that before the factory belonged to the Soviets, but now to the Armenian republic.
Furthermore, the government is now studying the question of reopening the
"This station is of nuclear power station.
the Chernobyl type" said Hagop Sanasarian, the head of the Green Union of
Armenia, "built in a seismic region. Plus,
16 there is no experience where a nuclear
International Viewpoint # 232 • July 6, 1992
Canada. centre of this type is closed and then reopened".
"They don't support the cause of Karabakh; they follow the economic and political steps of Moscow; they don't share power with other parties; they are behaving like the old regime". These words come from speeches by supporters of Parour Ayrikian, a nationalist militant who spent 17 years in jail under the old regime. Among other things, Ayrikian is demanding a more thorough break with Moscow, including the creation of a national army and currency. At an earlier stage, he had called for better relations with Turkey to replace economic dependence on Russia. Every Saturday around 5,000 of his supporters gather in Opera Square to listen to anti-governmental speeches.
Historic parties reemerge
The best organized opposition group is the historic Dashnak Party. In power during the first Armenian Republic after the Russian revolution, they were chased out by the Red Army to become the most prominent and the most anti-Soviet Armenian organization in the diaspora. In 1990, the party opposed immediate independence and stressed maintaining good relations with the Soviet Union and Russia, to offset the "historical danger from Turkey," as their candidate in the 1990 elections, Sos Sarkissian put it. For many Armenians, the Dashnaks were a symbol of the anti-Soviet struggle; this pro-Russian stance lost the party some of its popularity. In the past two years the party has stepped up activity in Armenia and has considerable influence in Karabakh both among the fighters and in the Karabakh Supreme Soviet.
The ex-Communist media is now controlled by the ANM, which continues the old tradition: often the front page of the paper is devoted to the president's latest speech. After the collapse of the old regime, many small publications arose. "I took part in publishing a samizdat journal dealing with cultural and political matters," said Vahan Ishkanian, "later it became a legal monthly publication, but we had to stop because of financial difficulties" Now he worked for the most popular daily, Yergir ("Country") and said that most of the local papers are trying to link up with diaspora parties as their last hope of surviving market conditions. Yergir belongs to the Dashnak Party, as do some other weekly and monthly publications. Similarly the Ramgavar (liberal) Party has an influential paper printed twice a week.
This near monopoly by the diaspora parties of the young media has political consequences. Consisting mainly of refugees who survived the First World War massacres, the diaspora considers Turkey as the Armenians' main enemy. The government, which is trying to establish diplomatic and economic relations with Turkey, has even hinted at a public renunciation of territorial demands on that country; such a position is viewed as treason by West Armenians.
Many in Yerevan fear that the increasing involvement of Turkey on the Azeri side would lead to direct war between the two countries. An economy in crisis, war in Karabakh and on Armenia's borders and a nationalism fuelled by the frustrations and injustices of history; could the end of this century turn as tragic for Armenians as its beginning? *
ET'S begin with your background.
I was born in 1954 in a peasant family. My parents, unfortunately, got divorced, and I grew up in a family of two sisters, my mother and my aunt, myself and my aunt's daughter. As the only man in the family, I was actively involved in the household economy very early on.
After finishing school, I started working in the kolkhoz (collective farm) and
I also completed a course for truck drivers. Then I was called up. I consider that
I received good training in the army: I completed a junior aviation specialist's course and worked as a mechanic servicing aircraft weaponry. When I returned home, there was really no work for me as a truck driver or mechanic; so I left for
Minsk and got a job at Minsk Avtozavod which makes MAZs, middle class trucks, considered as the best of their type in the
Soviet Union, that is, the former Union.
• Did you have any moving to the capital city Problems
In those days it involved certain complications, but if you were moving for work in a large enterprise, it wasn't very difficult, all the more so as I went to work in a foundry shop, where they were short of workers, and I was already familiar with a lot of the machinery. I was taken on as a mechanic for lifting equipment, cranes, tackles, and so on.
I got into a good brigade, with a very good team leader, generally a very positive worker environment.
The collective was a big one
— more than
30,000 people in the factory.
I worked in no.
2 foundry shop, the largest in the former
Union ministry, with over 1,000 people, in three shifts.
I worked. like any other worker. I don't think I was in any way exceptional. Of course, I tried to do my job well. And since I had earlier been involved in sports, I also participated in competitions on the shop's team and was active in youth tourism, camping, hiking.
Then in 1980 — I was 25 — the chairman of our shop's union committee left. I was on vacation at the time: I had recently got married. When I returned home, my neighbours told me that people had come three times looking for me. I was alarmed: maybe something had happened. I went over to the shop, where some people from our Komsomol2 organization told me that my name had come up in discussions about a new shop chairman. This was totally unexpected for me. • Why did they choose you?
The younger workers supported me; they knew me at work. It's hard to talk about oneself. But for some reason they said I could be trusted. • What was the former chairman like? Did he defend his workers?
For that period, it's very hard to figure out who defended the workers and who didn't. Conditions were totally different. Sure, there were many problems in the foundries, especially the harsh work conditions. But the system that existed then didn't really give any basis for you to think that things could be different. Meetings were held in a routine manner, collective agreements were signed that on paper included improvements in work conditions. Wage issues weren't even formally discussed, since wages were under strict central control.
But there were conflicts. As early as 1970, there was a strike in our steel foundry over wages. But that was an exceptional event that the whole republic and Moscow learned about. The system at the time didn't allow for much open conflict. And it wasn't just a matter of repression; it was also people's mentality. I'm trying to understand these things now. We had no information about the outside world, no real contacts, and, unfortunately, the majority of people felt that things couldn't be I was elected chairman of the shop committee There were other candidates, but I got a majority. At first I found the job very difficult: more than a thousand people under one roof, three shifts,
BELARUS many problems, including personal ones — housing, childcare and the like. They also foisted the allocation of cars and other goods on us.3 • Were you working full time for the
Yes, there were over a thousand people, after all. Exactly three months had gone by when I had my first serious conflict with management. We had a new shop head, a man with a long work record at the factory who tended to look at things through the eyes of a master (khozyain). A young worker had been drinking and was absent from work, and it wasn't the
The shop head told him he was going to be fired. But we had, and still have, a system which requires the consent of the union committee for dismissals. Our committee met, and on my recommendation, we refused to give consent. We had heard the worker out and decided that, as he was young, he deserved a chance to correct his ways. In those days, getting fired under the clause on violation of work discipline meant you carried a black mark around with you for the rest of your
So the shop head came to talk to me. I explained our position. In the end he said: "If that's how it is, then I don't need you or your committee". He ordered me to reconvene my committee and get consent. That tells you something about the place of the unions in those days. I simply answered: "If you have the power to force the committee to take that decision, then convene it, only I won't be there". That's
But I have to give him credit: he apparently thought things over and returned after a couple of hours to excuse himself, though he still insisted I was wrong and that the worker would continue to violate discipline. I answered that if he did, we'd look at it again, but that a young person in particular deserves to be given a chance. And true enough, the worker didn't
Another conflict arose during a discussion of work conditions. We were listening to a report by the head of the section. Our shop committee asked some very pointed questions about his work. His boss, the head of the shop, defended him in a very crude manner: "I'm the best judge of the section head's work!" There were a lot of workers there, and I had to
1. Migration to large cities was controlled through a residence permit (propiska) system.
2. Communist Youth League.
3. Factories were allotted a certain quantity of cars and other scarce goods that would be sold to workers and administrative personnel. The shop commite decided who would be given a chance to buy. 1 7 as only a few items were allotted to each shop. July 6, 1992• # 232 International Viewpoint
International Viewpoint # 232 • July 6, 1992
BELARUS answer firmly: "In your own office at your own meetings, you can judge the work of your managers, but here we're looking at things from the workers' point of view, and we're considering how he works with the collective".
Had these conflicts not arisen, and had I not taken these positions, it's possible that I might have become the ordinary kind of committee chairman for those times. • You mean that the fact that you were forced to take these stands at the very start helped to determine your later behaviour?
Yes, but I wasn't really conscious of what I was doing. I'm sure I made my share of mistakes, but I intuitively took the path that I did. And in fact, I eventually developed pretty good relations with management. We never again had such pointed confrontations, and when it came to resolving problems that arose in the shop, the shop head ordered his foremen to prepare carefully for meetings with our union committee.
I spent six years as chairman of the shop committee. Our factory is divided according to types of production. The foundry department had eight shops in all, with 3,500 people. One day, the chairman of the foundry department's union committee was forced to resign by a vote of no confidence at a worker's conference. • The union operated democratically
Well, at least among the foundry workers. Votes of no confidence also occurred in the case of secretaries of the foundry's party organization. You see, foundry work is hard, conditions are very difficult, there is more danger and more injuries. The workers figure there's nowhere to go from there. And that work makes them more open, more independent and demanding. It also brings people together. • Is it somewhat like the miners then?
It's comparable. And I'm not only judging by our workers. I've seen the same thing in the foundries of Tractor Factory and in other places. Their mentality and behaviour are different. In 1986, I was elected chairman of the foundry department committee. • Why was your predecessor ousted?
He was blamed for two sorts of thing. One was that his committee conducted a conciliationist policy in dealing with management on work conditions. The 18 other was dishonesty in the allocation of cars. People knew that I had adopted rather firm, critical positions towards the administration and they felt I could hand-
I worked there for three years. It was difficult but good work. We succeeded in solving a lot of problems related to work conditions. For example, the auxiliary workers in the foundries — mechanics, electricians and so on - had been trying for a long time to get special pension benefits for harsh work conditions. We had two lists of special jobs in the Soviet Union. List number one included jobs with "especially harmful work condi-
, in metallurgy, mining and so on. People in these jobs had the right to an early pension after 25 years. List number two gave the right to a pension five years earlier than ordinary workers. The jobs of these auxiliary workers used to be on that list until 1968. There was a tendency in those years to cut jobs from the list. It was done through the trick of changing their descriptions.
In 1989, the auxiliary workers finally organized a street protest meeting and decided to strike. I was present, and they elected me to head the strike committee. But I asked them, as chairman of the department committee, not to strike until I had tried other means. We negotiated with the administration but couldn't
Then the government joined the talks - representatives of the State Committee on Labour and Social Security. By 1989, the situation had already been somewhat changed, and the government was paying some attention to these issues when we raised them. After two weeks of talks, we finally won. As a result, these workers eventually won special pension rights across the republic.
Towards the end of that year, abuses were discovered on the part of the administration and the factory trade union committee in the allocation of cars, housing, and so on, and I had to come out with a strong criticism and demand a full enquiry. Our foundry committee demanded a factory-wide delegates' conference to discuss the allegations. But of course the administration understood only too
So the director issued a decree ordering the reorganization of the foundry department: each of the ten shops became a separate department, so that in effect our department no longer existed. And since the department no longer existed, neither did its union committee. The foundry workers wanted to fight, but we saw that the situation in the plant as a whole didn't offer much hope for raising the rest of the
• Was the foundry department alone in the factory in its independence towards management?
There were two such committees; the foundry department and the pressing department. These are the two departments where conditions are the harshest, where the work is the most harmful and
Soviet labour laws required that an elected union official be offered another job at the end of his tenure or in case his position was eliminated. They offered me a job as assistant director of an administrative bureau. But I understood perfectly that once I accepted an administrative position, I would no longer be covered by the legislation that protects workers from arbitrary dismissal and that I could be
I had a long talk with the director. My main idea was that he was acting against his own interests in seeking subservient unions. After all, when a union committee functions as it's supposed to, most questions get resolved directly in the shop, and the authority of both the administration and the union committee are firmer. But of course I didn't expect him to retreat. Since I had already graduated from the institute in economics (I had been studying in the evenings), I took a job as an economist in the foundry shop. • Did you have an ATK (workcollective council)4 at the factory?
Yes, but when the new enterprise law appeared in 1990, management dissolved it and created an enterprise council where half the people are appointed by management and half elected by the workers. Anyway, it hadn't had much influence.
It was in May 1990 that I lost my job as chairman of the union committee, though I remained in the presidium of the factory committee. Towards the fall of that year, I began to think about the creation of an independent union of auto and agricultural machinery workers in our republic, since we didn't have any separate republican structures.
There was only the union's central committee in Moscow, the current International Algamation, which was under the ministry's thumb. In the republic, we only had representatives of the central committee, who had no real power or influence. • Was your idea exclusively a reaction to the central committee's dictatorial ways and its subservience to the ministry, or were there also nationalist motivations involved?
It wasn't at all nationalist. Even while I was committee chairman, I had come out against the way the union was organized. The republican structures decided
nothing; they merely wrote reports and signed orders from the ministry.
Did you give any thought to reforming the union's central committee in Moscow?
In practice, that couldn't be done from the republics. At the central level people were, in fact, appointed. Elections were completely formal. • You are saying that it was easier to change things at the republican level. Was this the sort of consideration that generally fuelled the drive for republican sovereignty that swept the Soviet Union?
Yes, it's an entirely objective process — people wouldn't have been moved to fight for sovereignty if Moscow had not exercised such dictatorial powers. All power was concentrated in Moscow. No enterprise director could decide anything of importance without Moscow's OK. All the major financing came from Moscow. That's not a normal situation. • Then the push for sovereignty was more a democratic than a nationalist movement?
Of course. But it eventually fed nationalist sentiment too. When relations with the centre are bad, there is a natural tendency to attribute all problems to the
Our republic had a Federation of Trade Unions that unites all the branch unions. But it too was extremely conservative, and its officials were selected in the same way as Moscow's. One of the reasons we have so many problems with our unions is that the party apparatus consciously placed its functionaries, who in their majority had no lower level union experience, in the unions' higher structures.
They brought to their union jobs their own way of dealing with people and their ideological dogma. This had a serious effect on the quality of the union's work, and it meant that it was impossible for a worker from the bench with different views to move up into the higher positions.
It was only in 1990 that our union and the Union of Radio and Electronics Workers democratically elected central coun cils in the republic. Alexander Bukhvostov, who has been chairman of Gomel'mash, became our president. He had led the strike movement over the consequences of Chernobyl in 1990 and headed the march of Chernobyl victims to Red Square during the party conference to demand measures for defending the population against the consequences of
Statistics now show how child mortality and the cancer rate have risen. There was an attempt at the time to suppress these problems in the republic. The protests forced the authorities to deal with them. Now at least something is being • How were the elections of your republican union executive organized?
The idea of organizing a republican union arose in the factories. The organizing committee for the first conference was made up of delegates elected at conferences in the plants and of Byelorussian representatives of the Moscow central committee in our Federation of Trade Unions. The latter did purely technical work. Bukhostov was elected from among two competing candidates.
The conference was the first stage. It met in September 1990, elected a president and a commission to write a constitution. I was also asked to participate in it. The constitution states, for example, that employers can't be in the same union with hired workers. That point met a lot of resistance both from the union committee in our enterprises and from other unions. It might seem natural to you, but we have trouble even defining who an employer is. • Has the administrative personnel already left your union?
Not yet, but we are constantly raising that question. In writing the constitution, we had two basic aims. One was to make
BELARUS the union democratic, to get rid of the pyramidic structure. The plant organizations had to become the foundation of the union, and all the other structures should serve their interests. I knew from my own experience what it's like when things are the other way
Union functionaries would come to the plant and issue orders; they never asked how they could help us. In that rigid structure, we sent them all the dues we collected, and they decided how much and for what purposes we
The mistrust of higher structures has become deeply rooted. As people who had experience in the plants, we understood this and in writing the constitution, we took this into account. So, for example, only ten per cent of the dues, the smallest proportion of any union in the republic, go to the central council. We decided to take the minimum needed to maintain the apparatus and support our work. 90 percent remains in the primary
That at least is how we felt things should be in the first stages. It makes work with the primary organization easier. When they have problems, I say: "Excuse me, but you have 90 per cent of the funds". We ask and demand that they don't spend the money but create strike • How do the factory committees use their 90 per cent of the dues?
We still face big problems in the lower organizations. A lot of functions that rightfully belong to the state are still hung around our necks, a lot of cultural activities, libraries, sports, swimming pools and so on, that are maintained by our membership dues. For the transitional period, we are demanding that the state assume part of the costs.
At present, the government gives us six percent of the social insurance fund for maternity and sick leave, funerals and recreational activities. But we're trying to get the system of social insurance reformed. We don't want to administer these things ourselves but we want to be able to control how the government administers them and to determine policy.
So you see why many of our unions aren't what we feel they should be. They're kept so busy with social insurance, sports, childcare and the like, that they 4. Work-collective councils were provided for by the 1987 enterprise law and abolished by the 1990 enterprise law. These were to be democratically elected self-management councils, though in practice the vast majority were subservient to manage5. A large agricultural machinery production asso. 19 ciation centred in the town of Gomel'. July 6, 1992 • # 232 International Viewpoint
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BELARUS can't pay the necessary attention to the price of labour, which is the primary issue.
• How much resistance was there to this drive to renew the republican union? And did you have much support from below?
Of course there was resistance, mainly from the structures above the plant level. However, I can't say that there was much pressure from rank and file workers to reform the union. • Then, the changes are due mainly to the efforts of a group of activists from the factory committees?
To a very large degree. That's because you can't really expect independent actions of workers or of individual shop committees in an unreformed system.
After electing a president and a constitutional committee, we moved on to the second stage: formulating demands for a collective agreement and organizing a founding congress to adopt the demands. The congress adopted the demands in even stronger form, something quite unusual in our republic, as well as a plan of action. It was there also that I was elected vice president from among two candidates. The president and the vice president are the only two officers in the union on the republican level.
The work was very hard at first because I was alone. The president was from Gomel', and it took him half a year to arrange his affairs and move to Minsk. The biggest problems involved breaking the old mentality of the union committees in the enterprises. They were used to awaiting instructions from above. We put moral pressure on them, and we can do that because our authority among the workers, who can see the sort of things we are doing, is rising. The rank and file are beginning to pose a lot of questions to their committees. Many of those people haven't been able to change their ways and are being forced to leave. Others are
Another complex problem was to clarify our relations with the Federation of Trade Unions. It was supposed to be a coordinating centre that dealt with issues that couldn't be resolved by the branch unions but instead had grown accustomed to ordering around the branch unions and running them.
When we and the radio-electronic workers adopted our new constitutions, the Federation tried to plug into that process and tell us what to do. But we were able to break the old relations and force them to recognize that it is the branch unions that create and finance the federation, 20 that the branch unions assign to it. which should deal only with those issues
• Were the developments in the radio-electronics union similar to those in your union?
In our work over the last year and a half we realized that we saw things in the same way, so we united to form the Association of Industrial Unions. Each branch has over 250,000 employees; we're the two biggest unions of the 23 in the republic. Representation in the Federation is one delegate per union, regardless of size. Since we were a very long way from being a decisive force in it, we decided to form our own association, though we are still in the Federation. The Federation is conservative and holds us back. Many of the leaders in the other branch unions are close to retirement: many were party functionaries in the past.
The Federation was to a large degree responsible for the April strikes. 6 The growing discontent among the workers was already evident at the Federation's plenary session in February. I spoke there and proposed concrete actions. At my union's plenary session, we decided to put the following demands to the government: stop the rise in prices - they were rising rather quickly, though the government denied that - and adopt social protection of the population. At that stage, however, we were only a few months old, and the government didn't pay much attention to us, preferring to deal with the
Discontent continued to grow. At a meeting of the presidium of the Federation, I spoke very bluntly; if we don't put forth demands that have specific dates attached to their fulfillment and unless we are prepared to back them up with strikes, the unions might find themselves overboard. My proposal to set March 28 as the deadline for a favourable government response to demands on prices and social guarantees was adopted.
The next day I open the paper and start reading the Federation's declaration. It seemed OK until I realized that there was no deadline for the government's answer.
It was the old style. And that failure had a big influence on the further course of events. The government seemed ready to negotiate. But how? "Well, you see, we just can't pay for these things..." Had there been a strike deadline, we could have turned to the rank and file and mobilized them to exert pressure.
Meanwhile, without waiting for the government, our union began to negotiate with the plant directors to raise wages and pay compensation for the rising cost of meals in the canteens. The radio-electronic union did the same. But there were universal engineering plants located not far from ours in which the unions did nothing. On April 3, the day after the price rise, their workers pointed to the gains in our plant just across the street. At the Automatic Lines and Kirov (engineering) factories, the workers spontaneously poured out into the yard and held a mass meeting.
Representatives of the Workers' Union and of the Popular Front arrived.? An activist at one of the plants had informed them of the protests. They tried to convince the workers to stop work and offered to lead them. After a couple of hours, the meeting broke up. But a wave of agitation was already sweeping through the other factories, as the rumor of a strike reached them. Of course, had the trade union committees been up to their task, they would have systematized the demands, openly declared the support for the workers, and there probably wouldn't have been any strike committees and all the rest that followed
But the next day, since the administrations had not adopted any measures to calm people's concerns, the workers of those two plants came to work and then went to the other plants to ask them to support the movement. It proceeded in a very chaotic manner, with groups here and there striking, but not whole plants. Not much happened that morning, until a conflict over wages, not directly related to the price rise, arose on the assembly line in our Avtozavod.
Aware of the agitation on the other factories, 4-5,000 workers stopped work and went to see the administration. Neither management nor union representatives came out to speak to them. So someone said: "Forget them. Let's go to Govern-
So they began to march in columns, in their overalls, to the central square. They included most of our foundry workers as well as several thousand workers from our Tractor Factory. When news reached the others that the Avtozavod workers were marching, they also began to form into columns and move, but, as I said, only groups of workers, not whole factories.
In some factories, the union committees began to wake up and went together with the columns, but very timidly. In the Tractor Factory, the union committee itself suggested the election of a strike committee. But then the two committees began to fight among themselves. The marchers had no clear goals except to raise their wages to compensate for the price rise. * 6. Byelorussia saw a series of large-scale strikes in April 1991 that were set off by the price rise of April 2. 7. The Workers' Union was set up just a few days before the strike by workers with links to the Byelorussian Popular Front, a liberal nationalist movement.
Who are the privileged?