فصل 14

CHAPTER 14

THE REVOLUTION UNDERGROUND

The life of the underworld was now rumbling around them, with deputies continually running to and fro, trains going up and down, drawn by trotting horses. The darkness was starred by countless lamps.

—EMILE ZOLA, Germinal

For the first few years of the glasnost era, Moscow News, Ogonyok, and the rest of the liberal press had only hinted at the connection between the seventy-year rule of the Communist Party and the disastrous state of the country. The year of miracles in Europe, 1989, began with the first opportunity for the people of the Soviet Union to make that connection for themselves. On March 26, the people would vote in multiparty elections for the new Congress of People’s Deputies. Despite Aleksandr Yakovlev’s advice to split the Party, to separate the progressives from the conservative majority, Gorbachev believed that by strengthening the government, by creating this new Congress, he could gradually diminish the role of the Party regulars.

In the months before the balloting, I spent many nights at election meetings and debates—in Moscow, Leningrad, the Baltic states, in provincial Russia. The issues varied somewhat. In the Baltics, of course, the emphasis was on sovereignty, on gaining greater distance from Moscow; in the Russian provinces, the emphasis was on empty stores, ground-level economics. But everywhere the talk was of freedom, of learning democracy. Confronted for the first time by the prospect of political choice, people were both confused and exhilarated. They had no prior experience of genuine debate or choice, and yet they seized the opportunity immediately: Nowhere was that more the case than in my own precinct—Gorbachev’s district—the October Region of Moscow.

On a January afternoon, after the first shift had let out, the bureaucrats and workers of the Red Proletariat machine-tools factory filed into their auditorium and saw their boss and director, Yuri Ivanovich Kirillov, waiting onstage to greet them. For once, Kirillov was all smiles, saccharine and ingratiating. He looked like a game-show host in a bad suit. With his seigneurial handshakes and shoulders-back posture, he showed every sign of expecting the 325 “electors” for the six thousand workers to fall into place, to rise as one and nominate him as their candidate for the March 1989 elections.

The workers stashed their heavy wool coats under their chairs, settled down, and quickly chose a secretary and a chairman. Then the chairman called a factory foreman named Nikolai Blinkov to the rostrum. Blinkov read a long, formal speech, talking of the “grave responsibilities” of political reform. “There were so many mistakes in nominating candidates in the past,” he said. “This is why we are so nervous now.” Then, “without further ado,” Blinkov proposed the nomination of Yuri Ivanovich Kirillov. Surrounded by his deputies in the first row, Kirillov crossed his legs suavely and smiled, the master of all he surveyed. The election meeting was going splendidly, just as he had planned it. The birth of democracy was going to be wonderful.

“This man,” Blinkov said, pointing to Kirillov, “this man is a simple Soviet worker. He is not spoiled by applause.” Blinkov praised Kirillov’s “magnificent” two years as factory director, his “extraordinary facility with problem-solving,” his “superlative” relations with the workers, his “uncanny” ability to remember everyone’s name. The applause was furious in the front rows near Kirillov, and softened out in the rear.

Then someone on the aisle rose and asked Blinkov the first impertinent question of the afternoon.

“Are there any other candidates proposed?”

There followed a moment of tense silence. Clearly, this question was not part of the script. Blinkov blinked, then scanned the first row, a rabbity panic in his eyes. But the denizens of the first row could not help him, Kirillov least of all. They had not anticipated the messiness of democracy any more than Blinkov had.

Blinkov conceded the obvious. “On my way over here,” he said, “I was told that in all the work collectives there were no other names suggested.” The chairman edged Blinkov away from the podium and called on a succession of Red Proletariat employees to sing the praises of Yuri Ivanovich. “From the day he walked in the door, our director was already a well-formed organizer,” said a worker named Sergei Khudyakov. “And thanks to him, our factory has a resort home for the workers in the Crimea.” A Komsomol leader pledged the “fealty of our youth to Yuri Ivanovich.” A foreman described the director’s “generosity of spirit” and “high intelligence.” And so it went. For nearly an hour, the meeting seemed like a grass-roots version of Brezhnev’s Central Committee circa 1978, a mix of oleaginous praise and muggy boredom. Through it all, Kirillov relaxed in his seat and smiled his kingly smile.

But in the transitional moment between the last speech and what would have been the call for a voice vote of acclamation, all hell broke loose. A balding engineer named Viktor Oskin asked for the floor.

“You are not on the schedule,” the chairman scolded him.

But after some catcalls and shouted comments about “learning democracy,” Oskin got the microphone.

“I’ve just got one question,” he said. “Yuri Ivanovich already has so many duties. When will he find the time to work as a deputy in the legislature?” No one could quite believe this display of impudence.

“Get off the stage!” one person shouted.

“Who asked you to speak? Get off!”

“Away with him!”

But Oskin was unafraid. He dipped his face closer to the mike and shouted over the noise.

“You all say Yuri Ivanovich is such a good man,” he said. “You act as if there are no problems at all in our factory. This man has too many duties. He should refuse some. They’ve been telling us all along that we should have two or three candidates, and once again we’ve only got one. We are supposed to be talking about democracy, but we only have one candidate.” There was some hissing and booing, but just as many workers in the audience were quiet or nodding slightly, as if in agreement. Something had happened; there had been a breakthrough. Oskin plopped down in his chair, and his friends around him eyed him nervously.

Now a younger man asked for the chance to speak. He said his name was Konstantin Yasovsky and he represented a work collective. “Our collective doesn’t want to approve this man Yuri Ivanovich!” he said.

Yuri Ivanovich, for his part, was now squirming in his seat in the front row like a man with the bends.

Yasovsky went on: “We don’t know his program or what he’ll do. What is he for? What is he against? Our opinion is that we need him as a factory director, but only that.” The boos rolled over Yasovsky like a wave, and the undertow of hostility brought him sliding back to his seat. But then there were some cheers, here and there. Then catcalls, and arguments in patches of the crowd. The meeting had gotten distinctly out of hand. With a nod from one of the assistant directors in the front row, the chairman snatched the microphone off its stand and said, “Well, I guess it’s time for a vote.” But by now there were enough voters in the hall who knew something was wrong. The present seemed too much like the past. This time they would not be deceived. They would not be fooled or ignored. There were insults from every direction. Of course, no one had any illusions. There would be no alternative candidates, no rebellions, certainly. But there was at least a feeling, an insistence, that the appearance of democracy had to be served.

“A vote?” one man shouted from the back of the hall. “All our lives we’ve been raising our hands. Let the man tell us who he is and what he stands for before he gets our vote.” And so, finally, Yuri Ivanovich Kirillov spoke. This was his magnificent concession to the democratic process. He said he didn’t mind the criticism, “though it wasn’t very pleasant to sit through it.” He made no mention of a platform in his long, rambling speech. His only idea for reform at the national level was his “firm intention to build a recreation center for the workers of the Red Proletariat machine-tools factory.” The applause was polite. The chairman got his way, and there was, at last, a vote: 308 for Kirillov, 10 against, and 7 abstentions. The hands went up slowly, more in concession than affirmation. After all, what choice did they have? No one was prepared to rebel. The idea did not yet exist. At least not here, and not yet. The catcalls, the insistence on hearing the candidate, had been rebellion enough. The electors filed out of the auditorium in silence, guilty and downcast, as if they knew they had not gotten things right and did not yet know what it was they had to do.

The Communist Party, of course, wrote the election laws for the 1989 elections to ensure that it would have the vast majority of seats, and that is the way it turned out. More than 80 percent of the 2,250 deputies were Party members, the vast majority of them local secretaries, military officers, and other loyalists. The reason was simple. Every imaginable Party front group, from the Komsomol to the Union of Stamp Collectors, was guaranteed a raft of seats. Only one third of the deputies would come from open races. In conservative regions, especially Central Asia, single-candidate races were the rule, not the exception. “This was not a democratic election,” Sakharov told me. “It was rigged quasi-democracy. The only oases of democracy were where the system was somehow imperfect.” In those few spots where the elections were imperfect—meaning open—the establishment Party candidates invariably lost. Central Committee members, admirals, generals, apparatchiks of every sort suffered the humiliation of public rejection.

Such was the case in the October Region when Comrade Kirillov was one of a half-dozen apparatchiks who didn’t even come close. The runoff came down to a popular, and not very intelligent, television commentator and Ilya Zaslavsky, a textiles engineer, not quite thirty years old, who walked on canes and spoke in a barely audible mumble. Zaslavsky, running on a platform of general reform with an emphasis on the rights of the disabled, won easily.

When the Congress opened in May, Zaslavsky was one of dozens of young liberals who had gotten into politics only because they had finally seen a leader they thought they could trust. Zaslavsky, Arkady Murashev, and Sergei Stankevich of Moscow, nationalists from the Baltic states, Armenia, and Georgia, environmentalists from Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Siberia—they all had seen the elections as an opening. That period just before and after the first Congress was a time of euphoria. These were days when radical democrats thought that reform of the Party was not only possible, but the only route to change. Somehow the chance of a reactionary counterrevolution seemed academic, remote.

That first session of the Congress was an endless series of astonishments. In the opening minutes of the Congress, Sakharov ambled to the podium to make the first speech. Later on, Sakharov would make specific proposals about the creation of a multiparty system and a “decree on power” that would lead to constitutional democracy, but now he kept his remarks general, trying, it seemed, to serve simply as a model of patience and openness. But the Congress quickly became something hotter, as if the crises of seventy years could wait no more; what followed was an explosion of public debate and revelation. A former Olympic weightlifter, Yuri Vlasov, blasted the KGB, saying that the secret police ran an “underground empire” in the Soviet Union and had not reformed at all. A law professor from Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak, attacked the generals and Party officials who had sanctioned and led the assault in Tbilisi against a peaceful demonstration in April 1989 which left at least nineteen people dead. Yuri Karyakin, the Dostoevsky scholar, called for the removal of Lenin’s remains from the mausoleum on Red Square and for their “decent burial.” The liberals in the Congress also were beginning to make clear they would criticize Gorbachev, even oppose him, when they thought it necessary. When Gorbachev was put up for election by the Congress as chairman of the legislature, an obscure and slightly woolly delegate from northern Russia, Aleksandr Obolensky, nominated himself. “It’s not a question of winning,” he said. “It’s a matter of creating a tradition of political opposition and competition.” The action in the hallways during the frequent recesses was almost as dramatic as the speeches inside. At first, the young Soviet reporters watched with amazement as the Westerners walked up to the most powerful men in the country and pestered them with cameras, tape recorders, and notebooks. Within a few days, the Soviets were getting the hang of it. For the first time in their careers, members of the Politburo and leaders of the military and the KGB were subjected to embarrassing questions. For decades, no one had dared ask them about the weather, much less the erosion of the Communist Party. Now they were being chased to the bathrooms and the buffet tables for their opinions, for accountings of themselves.

Gorbachev quickly mastered the art of spin control. Accidentally on purpose, he would wander into a huge crowd of journalists just after the lunch breaks, make his case, and disappear. Vremya, of course, would run his comments in full, giving him the role as both chairman and media commentator over his political creation.

Sakharov, for his part, endured interviews with a wistful patience. The camera lights, he must have understood, were part of modern democracy. Everyone talked, and talked. Or almost everyone. Day after day I stalked Viktor Chebrikov, the head of the KGB until 1988, a man with a gnarled face and the posture of a Roman emperor. As he paced the halls, very few deputies dared approach him. Those who did say hello were grasped by the elbow and taken off to a private corner. Chebrikov would not talk where other deputies or foreigners could overhear him. I kept after Chebrikov, and at first he shooed me away as if I were a small cloud of gnats. When I would not go away, he said, “We’ll talk tomorrow.” Or “after the next break.” Finally, toward the end of the session, he said, “Mr. Remnick, there will be no interview.” Strange, but I had never told him my name.

No one in the country could tear himself away from these televised sessions of the Congress of People’s Deputies. No newspaper, no film, book, or play had ever had such an immediate political effect on the people of the Soviet Union. The sessions were broadcast live for two weeks, and factories and collective farms reported that no work was getting done. Everyone was gathered around television sets and transistor radios. People simply could not believe what they were hearing. Though the reform-minded deputies were in a distinct minority—no more than three or four hundred out of 2,250—they were much more savvy about getting to the microphone, and Gorbachev was usually eager to hear from them. It was only when someone went beyond the barriers of the official conception of perestroika—most famously, Sakharov’s demand for a repeal of the Party’s hold on power—did Gorbachev grow impatient and call for the next speaker. Gorbachev ruled his Congress with the swiftness and guile of Sam Rayburn in his House of Representatives. When Sakharov’s criticism exceeded Gorbachev’s tolerance, he dropped all pretense of democracy; he switched off the microphone and sent Andrei Dmitriyevich to his seat.

The reformers were overcome with a sense of triumph and possibility. While the session was on they had seen the Chinese leadership order the slaughter of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Beijing, and they had the sense that for once, the leader of the Soviet Union was not the same sort of butcher. Vitaly Korotich, the sly editor of Ogonyok, walked with me toward the Kremlin gates talking of how the conservatives were in for a “crash,” how the country had changed in just two weeks. “The people in this country have always been afraid of power,” Korotich said. “Now, maybe, the powerful are becoming a little afraid of the people.” By the end of the session, the conservatives in the Politburo were impossible to find. They were finally embarrassed and tired of all the criticism and challenges. They made liberal use of their private, guarded entrances and exits and were rarely seen on the way from the Hall of Congresses to their waiting limousines.

But for all the exhilaration of the elections and the catharsis of the Congress, no one had any idea what it would lead to. From start to finish, the Gorbachev era was an improvisation, with alternating dull spots and high-wire periods. Until now, the politics of the country had gone unseen. Politics had been a matter of the Kremlin, the closed, untelevised sessions of the Politburo and Central Committee. The gulf between the state and the individual was unbridgeable. Even the huge street demonstrations in Yerevan and the Baltics went nearly unreported in the main Party newspapers.

But now almost everyone had seen the accumulated anguish of seventy years broadcast live. They had become familiar with the ideas and personalities not only of the country’s leaders, but of Sakharov, Zaslavsky, and Afanasyev of Moscow. They had seen a bookish Estonian woman, Marju Lauristan, challenge Gorbachev’s authority as if it were almost … normal. They had even seen a half-articulate cabdriver named Leonid Sukhov take the podium and warn Gorbachev that, “like Napoleon,” he was being led by the nose by his own “Josephine,” his wife, Raisa. Another deputy demanded that Gorbachev answer for his new expensive dacha on the Crimean coast. Until now, Kremlin power had run on mystery as well as might. The Congress had ended all that in one two-week-long television extravaganza. The Congress hinted at something new, a revolution from below. But what form would it take? Who would lead it, and when?

Little more than a month after the Congress closed and Moscow shifted into its mode of summer torpor, perestroika spun out of control, first in the coal mines of Siberia, then in mines all across the country, from Ukraine to Vorkuta to Sakhalin Island. After July 1989, the Kremlin could never again have any confidence at all that it was the master of events. After July 1989, the illusion of a gradual, Gorbachev-directed “revolution from above” was over.

The “revolution from below” began when a group of coal miners in the Siberian town of Mezhdurechensk walked off the job at the Shovikovo mine, led by their shift leader, Valery Kokorin. The main issue was soap. The miners were angry, too, that their equipment was pitiful, that the work was wretched and underpaid, that food supplies were meager and benefits nonexistent. But what galled them most was the grit in every crevice of their bodies, the inability to come home from work and wash themselves clean. There was no soap.

All around the Kuznetsk Basin (the Kuzbass) of Siberia—in Mezhdurechensk, Prokopievsk, Novo-Kuznetsk, and Kemerovo—miners had been grumbling for years among themselves. They had never dared take their protests outside a small circle of friends and family. Their poverty—like the poverty of the farmhands in Turkmenia or the steelworkers of Magnitogorsk—was, simply, the way things were. But within twelve hours of the walkout in Mezhdurechensk, nearly every mine in the Kuzbass was on strike. “You cannot imagine how off-the-cuff this was. It became so enormous so quickly, but it started from almost nothing,” one of the miners at the Severovo mines, Ilya Ostanin, told me. Soon the strike spread to Vorkuta in the far north, to the Don Basin (the Donbass) in Ukraine, to Karaganda in northern Kazakhstan, to Sakhalin in the far east.

Gorbachev went on television looking stricken and exhausted, but still pretending to complete mastery. He had no choice but to try to make the strikes his own, to describe them as a healthy manifestation of a very young democracy and then pray they would end before the railway workers, collective farmers, or oil riggers got any ideas in their heads. He could not control an entire nation in rebellion. Even the conservatives in the leadership could not ignore the miners. The miners had the ability to shut down heavy industry and force the Kremlin to contemplate what a long, cold winter could mean.

After a five-hour flight and a half-hour ride through the Siberian taiga to the city of Kemerovo, I got my first glimpse of the working-class rebellion. In Armenia I had seen hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on the streets and almost as many in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. But there had never been anything quite so dramatic as this, nothing that had so vividly illustrated the disintegration of the workers’ state and the changing mind of a broad sector of the people.

In a hard afternoon sun, miners dressed in their work gear, tens of thousands of them, sat in the main square of Kemerovo outside the headquarters of the local government and Communist Party. “Get Up and Show Your Anger!” one sign read. “The Kuzbass Is Not a Colony!” said another. When some of the local Party officials took the microphone to tell the miners that the strikes were hurting old people and schoolchildren, they were shouted down and booed off the podium. The local Party press denounced the strikes, but one local television host, Viktor Kolpakov of Kuzbass, Day by Day, read straight, informative reports on the strikes around the country every night at eight.

The Siberian miners had an instinctive sense of media and imagery. They made for great television, and they knew it. Though they were not working, they came to the meetings dressed as “miners,” smeared with coal dust, wearing their helmets and gritty work clothes and boots. At dusk, they created an even more spectacular image when they turned on their Davy lamps. It seemed as if tens of thousands of huge fireflies had invaded the square and gone into a frenzy. The speakers, of course, took their turns under the feet of the city’s biggest statue of Lenin. The irony was lost on no one.

At first, only a few strike committees called for a Solidarity-style union. The initial demands were economic: more soap, detergent, toothpaste, sausage, shoes, and underwear, more sugar, tea, and bread. Vacations and a regular work week were at stake, not Gorbachev. He still represented, for the miners, a shining possibility, a figure of integrity. Almost everyone was careful to praise him, or at least show a measure of respect. One of the speakers, Pyotr Kongurov, a member of the strike committee in Prokopievsk, said that while ecological conditions and the standard of living remain “a focus of despair” in the mining town, “people are not blaming Gorbachev. They know they are able to strike because of Gorbachev. But on the other hand, they are waiting—and we can’t wait forever.” There had been strikes before in the Soviet Union: bus drivers in the city of Chekhov, airline pilots who refused to fly until safety standards were improved. But the symbolism of the miners’ strike was extraordinary. The miners embodied the vanguard of the proletariat, a bastion of Bolshevism in the old days. To look out at the great crowd of them in Lenin Square was to see a kind of poster for what had once been called “the masses.” And now the masses were walking off the job and declaring that socialism had not delivered anything—not even a bar of soap.

Soon the word came to Siberia from Moscow that the Coal Ministry was ready to promise more supplies, higher salaries, and other benefits. At a huge public meeting in the Kemerovo city square, the miners gathered to hear the details and vote. They heard promises from Moscow’s emissaries that planes would soon land loaded to the ribs with soap, meat, lard, cooking oil, and detergent. Salaries would be increased, vacations lengthened. Most of the miners were relieved. At least for now they had reached the limit of their daring and were ready to go back to work. They were ready to believe Moscow. Some miners warned that the deal would fall apart, that Moscow was “up to its old tricks,” but when it came time for the vote, nearly everyone agreed to end the strike. Tens of thousands of hands shot into the air to vote yes, to accept the deal.

That night, workers arrived at the Yagunovsko mines for their first shift. They seemed happy to be back, but wary, as if they were already losing conviction in their decision to return. “I’m down in these mines for thirty-nine years, and I’ll walk out again without any hesitation if Moscow tries to go behind our backs,” said a tunneler named Leonid Kalnikov. “I believed in Communism, once our great dream, and now I believe in the power of our strike. We’re not very experienced with this, but we are ready to learn.” Kostya Doyagin, who had worked in the mines near Kemerovo for seven years, said that with the thirty-five-point settlement worked out between the Kremlin and the local strike committees, “we’ve won a small victory. But it’s still small. We have to wait and see if they deliver.” The miners did not get much done that night. Mostly they stood around in the offices and down in the shafts talking through what had happened in the days before.

Even in the beautiful summer weather, the villages near the Yagunovsko mines were dismal places, more miserable than anything I had seen in West Virginia or the north of England. The miners and their families lived either in tiny wooden houses, shacks with a tin chimney, or, more often, two- and three-story apartment flats known as barracks. Families were packed into these dwellings, and somehow they could not keep them clean. No one took the garbage away. There was no hot water. Indoor plumbing was rare; in winter, that meant a trip to the outhouse in temperatures forty degrees below zero. Men confided that they and their wives were humiliated that they had to make love in rooms while their children were sleeping, or pretending to sleep. They had not been able to buy contraceptives of any kind for months. “The abortionist is the busiest man outside the mine,” one woman told me. The children in the villages seemed to have no toys and wandered through the streets, playing army, hurling sticks and stones. They were filthy and their teeth were already yellowing. Their parents’ teeth were rotten, and the lucky ones had caps made of brilliant silver or gold. They all looked older than they were. Men in their fifties who had just gone on pension were hunched over and sinewy from crawling through the mines and swinging a shovel since they were fifteen. They wore greasy jackets and caps. When you shook their hands, they felt like a fighter’s hands, rough and pillowy, swollen from too much work. Their eyes were vacant and filmed with rheum. The women, at least the ones who worked above ground, seemed to have more spirit in them, but not much. They were women who, after a certain age, had seen their husbands fall sick or break down and die.

It was a miserable life. Near the mines, I saw a ten-year-old runaway begging for coins. There were ration coupons for cooking oil, butter, vodka, meat, macaroni, and fat. There were coupons, but not always the products themselves. The main grocery store near the Yagunovsko mines had nothing but canned tomatoes, oatmeal, and rotting cabbages. People didn’t go hungry, but they did not have enough. Many people told me they got by mostly on bread and macaroni. Sausage was a twice-monthly treat. One morning my cabdriver swerved crazily, nearly plowing into a tree. He pulled over to the side of the road. He was disoriented and knew it. He apologized, saying, “I haven’t eaten much in a while.” The drugstores were empty unless you counted the bottles of leeches and the jars of aspirin. An old woman named Irina Shatokhina, who worked twenty years underground as a ventilator specialist, told me that one of her friends had had a mild stroke and could not get the medicine he needed. “Because of that,” she said, “he is now a vegetable.” If there were pleasures in the life of the miners beyond those of good talk and family, I did not see them. The most obvious pleasure killed them: in the morning, retired miners lined up at a vodka truck, and seconds after they’d made their score, they drained the bottles. When they could not get the. real thing, they made moonshine out of everything from hair tonic to canned peas. I saw one drunk lying in the street drinking water out of a puddle.

Everywhere, the air was thick with gas. Around the mines, the leaves on the trees were filmed with a gray dust. One pond in Kemerovo was so thoroughly contaminated with toxic waste that municipal workers got rid of dead stray dogs by throwing them in the water. After a few days, even the bones disintegrated.

The mines themselves pretended to be offices. Blocking the view of the elevators and the open pits, there was invariably a brick office building where the engineers and administrators had their cubicles and the workers had their lockers and showers. There was the illusion of “going to work” instead of plunging straight down to hell.

I met a few men outside the headquarters of the Yagunovsko mines one afternoon and asked where I could find the director. I wanted permission to go down the coal shaft.

“Why do you want to bother with the director?” one of them said. “He’ll just tell you a lot of shit and send you on your way. Come with us.” The miners took me inside to the locker room. I stripped to my underwear and T-shirt and they gave me a full set of gear. Without a moment’s condescension or mockery, they showed me how to wrap my feet in long white bandages and pull on black rubber boots. The miners’ suits were made of heavy, fireproof cloth, a thick canvas, and felt strangely light; there were thick rubber gloves that made your hands sweat, a plastic helmet, an emergency oxygen supply, and an extra flashlight. The miners flipped on their suits easily; they had spent most of their waking hours dressed like this and underground since their mid-teens.

We walked clunkily down a set of stairs and outside to the elevators for mine No. 6. The iron door slammed shut, and, packed shoulder to shoulder, we began our descent a quarter mile into the Siberian earth. Thirty miners dressed in greasy coveralls stared at their boots, then at the dents in the ceiling. Irritable, still half asleep, they shuffled and fidgeted. It took a while to get to where the coal was. Their helmet lamps darted nervously in the dark. There was no talk, only coughing and a few long yawns. The elevator went down and down, and my ears ached, then popped. The iron walls rattled against the shaft. Finally, we hit bottom and the door opened onto a labyrinth of dark halls of stone. A blast of cool air from the ventilators hit us in the face. It was the freshest air I had smelled since arriving in Siberia.

“Sometimes this town stinks so bad that the air down here is better than the air up there,” said Leonid Kalnikov. Even before the day’s mining had begun, his face was black, and I supposed mine was, too. As we walked through a long tunnel, Kalnikov said he was sixty years old and kept working because his family could not survive on his pension. There was no other way for him. He had no illusions; “I’ll probably drop dead down here one of these days,” he said, without self-pity. Forty years before, he had been a young, muscular man and had helped build this shaft, digging through the stone and putting up steel struts. “Now almost all the coal is gone,” he said. “It’s got some years left, but it’s just about dead. I’m not so eager to stick around for the last lump. But I may have no choice.” During the strike, the mine had been neglected. The labyrinth of alleys and tunnels and chutes had filled with water, which made the walking all the harder. As we made our way down the main shaft we began to stumble along through water a foot deep. The bottom was like the muck at the bottom of a pond, and after a few minutes my boots were filled with bits of coal, sharp-edged chunks that began to slice my ankles and blister the soles of my feet. Not one of the miners said a word about it. Along the way, we passed men, many of them in their fifties and sixties, tucked into crevices and cracks only a couple of feet high. They lay on their backs, or in some other contorted position, chipping at the coal face or repairing some part of the support structure. When they opened their mouths, coal dust would fall in. The men who had been working for an hour or more were completely black, and all you could see in the half-dark was their flashlights, their eyes, and their teeth. I glanced into one corner and saw three miners, black figures in shadow-light, and they did not move or speak. They were on their ten-minute break.

After a long walk—how far I could not tell—we reached a tiny railcar, a steel contraption that rides on tracks through the mine shafts. The “metro” took us another four miles farther along the mine, rumbling and rattling along like the Seventh Avenue local in New York. “It’s about the last chance you get to relax all day,” one of the workers said as he slumped in his seat and caught a nap. He slept soundly and then woke with a start when the brakeman put an end to the reverie.

Once the work began there could be no relaxing. To relax, to let attention drift, could mean a horrendous accident, an explosion or a collapse. The miners lived with this fear all the time. Each year a few men died at every mine in “minor” accidents, the sort that are never reported in the news, the undramatic kind. It was November when the mine last blew up. Vladimir Gaponyuk, who put in twenty-four years “underground,” told me he remembered the strange muffled sound of it. “It was close to silence, but you knew exactly what had happened.” Someone broke a safety rule, then a stream of methane caught a spark, and, in the end, four miners were crushed to death. “We’ve got accidents like that all the time,” Gaponyuk said. “We lose a couple every year.” Outside the mine shaft there were two posters: “Hail to the Work of the Twenty-seventh Party Congress” and “We Need Your Hard Work, But What We Need Most Is You Alive.” Valentina Alisovna, a member of the mine’s Party committee, was one of my guides. She watched me listen and take down the long, numbing litany of complaints: the horrible work conditions, the danger, the disgust with a life that goes nowhere. Party leader or not, she seemed ashamed, and at one point her eyes filled with tears. “We live like pigs, I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true,” she said. “The mine is a century behind the times. When we go home we can’t count on electricity. The water goes out on us. I’m no capitalist, but it’s obvious this system has done nothing for us.” All the miners were listening and nodding. Alisovna’s comment hung in the dank air. I had thought this had not been a political strike. That is what I had been told. No one said anything, and we got down on our knees and crawled through another tunnel. The ventilator wind whistled across the stone.

In the afternoon, while more teams of miners tried to clear the shafts of water and sludge and to get production moving once more, the Yagunovsko strike committee met in a wooden shack where the Communist Party committee had its offices. Across the country, the strike committees had become the center of political power at the mines. The Party and the official unions were doomed. Six men and Valentina Alisovna sat down to a table, the inevitable portrait of Lenin staring down over them. A poster on the wall read: “The Party is the mind, honor, and conscience of our epoch.” Everyone was anxious. They had some sense that all of the Soviet Union, and all of the world, had seen the images from the mines of Siberia, Ukraine, and beyond, but the strike committee had no idea of what would come next. There was no pleasure in their voices, only the suspicion that they were about to be betrayed, the conviction that there were more strikes, more trouble ahead.

“Look, it’s a long time before we have any real money in our pockets from this strike,” one of them said. “We have to watch out.” The talk bounced around the room, picking up speed and fury all the time.

“No one’s paying any attention to the fact that this mine is the worst around the Kemerovo region. It’s exhausted. There are two villages to feed, and we’re going to be out of coal in a few years. Some of the mines have no coal left in them at all.” “We’ve got to talk about redundant work. Sixty percent of us are working, and forty percent are standing around ‘supervising’ or smoking cigarettes upstairs.” “Not true. People are breaking their backs down there.”

“We need a united front. Obviously, our union is nothing. And we can’t stand alone, we’re just one little committee. We miners have to unite, form a real union or something.” “The Politburo can’t do everything for us. Perestroika has to move faster. Maybe we need new tires.” “It’s time to get rid of the bosses. We don’t need them.”

“We have to answer two simple questions: ‘How are we going to live?’ and ‘What do we do now?’ ” The meeting lasted an hour.

Afterward, I walked with the shift leader of mine No. 6, Anatoly Shcheglov, a huge man with a broad smile and mouth filled with gold teeth. The day had begun for him at five forty-five in the morning. He woke in his izba, a small log cabin two miles from the mine, and took a look at the Kuzbass, the morning paper, for more news about the mines still out on strike. His address was 2 Second Plan Avenue. In the summer, Shcheglov said, it was easier to get out of bed. The sun was already high. “At least you can walk outside without snow up to the waist in the dark,” he said.

Now the kitchen garden outside his door was rich, green with basil and cucumbers. Shcheglov said he ate a lot of cucumbers, “raw or pickled, there’s not much else.” He opened his refrigerator, a squat primitive thing that buzzed, and searched it for something for dinner. It was filled with food that he was lucky to have: a grayish roll of sausage, a few eggs, a cabbage, a cut of pork that was no less than three-quarters fat, a half-bottle of vodka. Lucky, because the stores were nearly empty. Nearby, at Fruit and Vegetable Store No. 6, known as the best in town, Anatoly went looking for something more to eat. The groceries available were these: half-brown cabbages, rotten tomatoes, cans of tomato juice and sardines, salt, and jars of pickled cabbage. And at the state “products” store off Johann Sebastian Bach Street there were more half-brown cabbages, more rotten tomatoes, smelts, five wan chickens, bins of white bread, and sacks of dried corn. To do better, they say here, you need blat, or connections. The only way to do better was to make a deal, to trade a bottle of home brew for a bag of decent carrots, an auto part for a cut of meat.

“The only other way is to buy from the private market,” Anatoly said, “and the prices there are impossible for anyone but a Party big shot, the guys who have the dachas down the road.” About a half mile from Shcheglov’s place was a prison camp: Prison 1648-043. Every day the convicts—thieves, rapists, murderers—were shuttled in railway cars between their cells and the “zone,” the work camp. People in town despised the prison, mainly because when the convicts were released, they said, they took jobs at the mines and the factories nearby, and many of them went back into crime. “But I’m not so sure it’s a bad thing,” Shcheglov said. “We have three guys down in our mine who were prisoners there. One of them stabbed his wife in the stomach. Another beat someone over the head. I think he killed him. And another guy’s wife was involved in some sort of scandal, and so he beat her to death. But they served their time. They work all right.” During the Stalin years, Shcheglov’s father was thrown in a labor camp for ten years for no crime at all. Anatoly remembered the day Stalin died, and how everyone around, even those with parents and friends in the camps, wept as if the world were lost. “It was March 1953,” he said. “I was a Young Pioneer, and we always wore those orange scarves. They gave us black ones to wear. And when the teachers started crying, we cried, too. Children always imitate the emotions of their parents.” Shcheglov was no radical. He heard the news that the miners in Vorkuta in northern Russia were still on strike and demanding an end to the Party’s constitutional hold on power. “I’m not sure that’s right,” he said. He was a trusting man who spoke with only the slightest bit of irony when I asked him about the effect the dust had on him after working in the pits for so long. “My lungs?” he said, taking a long drag on a cigarette butt. “The doctors always tell us our lungs are fine. They give us a checkup every year. And why shouldn’t I trust the doctors? If you can’t trust them, who can you trust?” For years, his dream had been simple: finish working at fifty or so, take his pension, and move outside of town to the taiga, the vast Siberian forest. What he wanted from the strike, he said, was just the chance to live “decently,” to have a cake of soap or toothpaste when he needed, to eat a cut of meat worthy of the word, to wear a pair of shoes that could last six months, and to have the chance to earn a profit if, by some miracle, his work brigade could squeeze some extra coal out of mine No. 6. And then, when it was time, he’d move out to the forest, where the fishing was good, the air was clear, and life was lived above ground. “I’m used to the dark,” he said. “But enough is enough.” The Siberian miners had no single leader, no Lech Walesa. The unions were a farce. They did not protect the workingman so much as they ensured his passivity and obedience to the Party. That had been Lenin’s design. Lenin declared Western-style labor unions “narrow-minded, selfish, case-hardened, covetous, petty bourgeois.” The unions under socialism, he said, would be “conveyor belts” of the Party. One of the first thing the miners did during the strike was to box out the union leaders and set up strike committees. Taking their cue from the miners, all kinds of laborers set up “workers’ clubs” in the Baltics, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, and in Russian rust-belt cities like Magnitogorsk, Sverdlovsk, and Chelyabinsk.

But there was no Walesa. Probably, Walesa had been a particularly Polish phenomenon, a figure able somehow to unite workers, Catholic clergy, and urban intellectuals. Anatoly Malikhin was as close as it came to a Walesa in the Soviet miners movement, but because of the vastness of the country, his influence was mainly in western Siberia.

Malikhin was an eloquent tunneler from Novo-Kuznetsk. He had the muscular, squashed-down, weary look of a man who had played fullback for one year too many. He was in his early thirties and looked ten years older. All that was left of his hair was a kind of monk’s tonsure. Malikhin said he was a “congenital enemy of the people,” a bitter joke. His grandfather, a Cossack, was arrested in the purges of 1937, and his father, as a child of an “enemy of the people,” was deported to Siberia. Malikhin’s mother, a Ukrainian, was also a political deportee.

For years, he said, he had led the same “unconscious existence” his father had, that everyone around him did. There was never any thought of protest, much less mutiny. Miners were serfs in a patrimonial system in which the lord was the Communist Party and its instruments were the schools, the trade unions, the mine directors. “Our system and our propaganda didn’t allow people to grow as individuals, to ask questions. We were raised to be uninterested,” Malikhin told me. “We had no idea how the state was run. We went to elections having no idea what they were about. They told us, ‘You are a small man, a punk, and why should you care? You just do what your boss tells you.’ The principle was this: ‘I am the boss and you are an idiot.’ If you tried to argue, even slightly, you were immediately thrown to work in the worst spots. You were crushed, humiliated. We are still dogs with three different kinds of collars: green, yellow, and red. They are the colors of the passes to the mine, and they can be changed or taken away for the slightest violation. Everyone violates the rules sometimes—that is the only way you can work with the equipment we have—so if they don’t like you, they seize on that and you’ll never work again. People who tried to preserve their dignity were crushed and thrown away.

“This is not a life for human beings. We have no time for leisure. We have no decent clothes. We spend our entire lives making just enough to feed ourselves and our children. The shift starts at six A.M., so you have to be up at four-thirty. You go to the mine, work eight hours underground, and all your life is work. When you come home you are too exhausted to do anything but collapse. On the weekend there are chores to do at home. About the only leisure we have is a mug or two of beer in the morning after the night shift. That’s it. And then you quit—if you haven’t already been killed in an accident. A few years later, your lungs give out, or your heart goes. Bye-bye. You’re dead.” In the coming months, I went to mines in Ukraine, Sakhalin, and Kazakhstan. As it became clear that Moscow would not—and, probably, could not—come through on the economic deal, I heard more and more miners and other workers talking about a political strike. They were giving up on the system. But I had also heard those very things on the afternoon before I went back to Moscow from Kemerovo. Another of the workers at mine No. 6, Ivan Narashev, invited me home. His hut, at 6 Krupskaya Street, was smaller and even plainer than Shcheglov’s. He could barely control his anger. He had voted against going back to work. “We should have stayed out until there was money on the table,” he said. “We should have been like bulls and waited until we got exactly what we wanted.” Hunched forward in his pine chair, Narashev talked about how the “party big shots” were trying to break the strike with “sweet words and no deeds.” He remembered being on the town square in Kemerovo one afternoon at the height of the general strike meetings and seeing the local KGB chief hovering near the speaker’s platform.

“I’ll tell you, I’m only thirty-seven but I’m ready to go for early pension,” he said. “I’ve had it. Ten years underground is enough for me. I’d like to get a car and put my wife and kids in it and drive away from here, somewhere where the air doesn’t burn your eyes. We should have had these strikes years ago. We’ve been destroyed by Stalinism and Brezhnev’s cronies. I’m ready now for a leader other than Gorbachev. Someone more like Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s a man of concrete deeds. How is it possible that until now our leaders eat all the pork and we chew on the bones? If Yeltsin were sitting where Gorbachev is, maybe it would be different.” What seemed to burn in him most was the feeling that the strike would turn out to be not the glorious victory that everyone at mine No. 6 was saying it was, but another humiliation, like gray sausages and no electricity. It was not yet clear that the miners’ strike of July 1989 was the first and most dramatic step in the creation of a link between the revolt of the intelligentsia in the cities and the nationalists in the republics with the political uprising of workers across the country. “Think about this country for a minute,” Ivan Narashev said as the room began to darken. “Our leaders have always divided us, kept us down. I think they’re doing that now, and they will rule again.”