Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 06:35:00 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: Moscow: They Called a Strike (and noone came)


And now something purloined from the IWW list . . .

_______
Subject: They Called a Strike (and noone cam
From: <cube-AT-glas.apc.org>
Reply-To: "Conference iww.news" <iww-news-AT-igc.apc.org>
Date: 27 Mar 1997 23:05:59 +0300

SHOCK THERAPY IN REVERSE

On the news yesterday there was an ordinary Albanian man.
The journalists asked him what they were doing. Were they
making a revolution, a riot, or what? He simply replied that
they had been the victims of shock therapy for years and now
they were employing the method of shock therapy in reverse
against the authorities.

Although our slogan "Albania is just the beginning" was
wildly popular at today's so-called strike, there was so
little action, indeed so little promise for it, that the
whole thing was even worse than the pessimists could have
predicted. With the FNPR hoping to get 20 million people out
on the streets, they perhaps drew only 2. The mood was very
defeatist; the cues were taken from the sell-out unions.

About 100,000 people turned out in Moscow, but it seemed
like, asides from the unionists, most people just came to
get leaflets and papers; it was possible to spread more than
1000 leaflets per 15 minutes, the people rushed to you to
get them. The radical elements obviously had no interest in
listening to the trade union bureaucrats and even yelled
curses at those carrying the blue Moscow Trade Union
Federation banner. But although there were a considerable
number of people geared towards more radical politics than
the bureaucrats had to offer, there was no feeling of
tension in the crowd, no feeling that something could
happen. It is clear that the people had the number of the
FNPR, understood that the whole thing was just a show and
didn't even bother to get excited about the whole thing. And
of course that's probably for the best; there were lots of
snipers training their guns on us and the Dzerzhinsky
division was hidden parked underneath the bridge.

So much for the farce of the whole thing.

Amongst the people and groups we saw at the meeting was
Yabloko who were giving out lots of leaflets and Democratic
Russia. The former anarcho-guru Andrei Isayev delivered the
funniest speech of the day; to a totally disinterested crowd
he promised (in a nice way) that if the goverment didn't pay
salaries by May Day, they'd be back. Given the fact that the
government must have been popping champagne corks over the
absolute failure of the unions to rouse the workers at all,
they must have been really shaking in their boots. The best
speech of the day apparently was made by Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, who at least told all these union bureaucrats
to fuck off and held his own rally.

>From the provinces, the most interesting scenes we saw were
>from Nizhny where Nemtsov addressed an angry, heckling
crowd. Probably there were disturbances in Tver; after all,
the hold them every Thursday. So far no news about that.

The press, naturally, played a part in quelling the
demonstration; as soon as the people understood that the
demo was rigged, they reacted very differently to the whole
event. A critical article written by one of our comrades was
the lead story in the Independent today; it basically told
of why the FNPR is not defending the workers' interests and
its dependence on cooperation with the government to protect
its property. (A similiar article appeared in one of the
English-language papers and is posted on IWW news.)

Of course on May Day, we certainly don't plan to go to any
red, brown or blue demonstrations.       Akai

"The workers' flag is blackest black
The red one's just for bureaucrats."




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