ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the development of the workers' movement and the problems it confonted both ideologically and organisationally and examines its contribution to the process of democratisation. While some of the prerequisites for democratisation were in place, the polarisation of political currents and institutions meant that an authoritarian backlash was also a conceivable outcome. The requirement to hold a congress of miners of the USSR was contained in one of the points of Resolution 608 and the official Union of Coal Industry Workers organised such a congress at the end of March 1990 in Moscow. The fragmentation of the party-state was completely intertwined with the collapse of the economy. In practice the unitary nature of the Soviet system also blurred the division of labour between STK and the Regional Council of Workers' Committees. The intertwining of political and economic activity was an inevitable consequence, however, of the character of Soviet-type systems, as Solidarity had discovered in Poland.