A forgotten opposition

I thought information on everything was available on the Internet. Curiously, this book seems to be an exception. It's mentioned, but I haven't found any material on the ultimate fate of the Soviet dissidents featured. Perhaps East Europeans have other concerns these days. Or perhaps it's because of the working class background of these particular dissidents. The world remembers intellectuals, not ordinary Joes.

"Workers against the Gulag" was published in 1979 by Pluto Press, a major left-wing but anti-Stalinist publisher in Britain. Swedish and French translations also exist. The Swedish version was published by a small group of anti-Stalinist Communists active in the Green movement. "Viktor Haynes" is apparently a pseudonym for J.V. Koshiw, an Ukrainian investigative reporter who is still something of a dissident. He has also published a book on the Chernobyl disaster. Who Olga Semyonova is, I don't know.

The book is somewhat confusing, but that seems to be the case with most publications featuring samizdat material. Most of it deals with a group of Soviet workers who tried to form an independent labour union in 1977. The group was led by Vladimir Khlebanov. They managed to hold two press conferences in Moscow for foreign correspondents, and their case was briefly highlighted by both the ILO, ICFTU, the British Labour Party and some French labour unions. Then, the whole matter seems to have faded into obscurity.

Most of the documents included in this volume are rather ill written, and deal with individual cases of workers who were harassed and persecuted by the Soviet authorities after protesting low wages, theft of company property by corrupt managers, high food prices, and so on. Still, precisely for this reason, the documents give a very "down to earth" impression. Indeed, most of these workers initially attempted to change things through legal channels. To an outsider, this may seem awfully naïve, but during the Brezhnev years, Communist newspapers did publish exposures of corruption on the local level, presumably as a safety valve to stop people from protesting corruption on higher levels! In many Communist nations, there were even satirical magazines which lambasted corruption (although more generally, without specific cases being mentioned). The workers featured in this book presumably attempted to use these "safety valves" to voice their discontent. Needless to say, they were not very successful. Many of them were imprisoned, often at mental hospitals. Still, Khlebanov seems to have avoided arrest for a while, since virtually all his co-workers opposed any attempts by the authorities to frame him.

For some reason, the editors also included a short piece on the Novocherkassk massacre, an event that happened already in 1962, when the Soviet army suppressed food riots in this particular city.

Finally, we learn that the people involved in these small dissident groups later joined SMOT, which for a time was a more well known group. SMOT was nominally also a labour union, but seems to have been a broader group in practice. Today, even SMOT seems to have been quietly forgotten!

"Workers against the Gulag" may not be the most graceful book around, but it does give us a glimpse of working class dissent in the Soviet Union during the late 1970's.