“In Pikalevo, something unusual for modern Russia is happening: the people are taking a stand against the government and its economic policies, blaming them as much as the factory-owners for their plight”.
So states today’s BBC report by Richard Galpin, which chronicles recent industrial unrest stemming from the shut down of factories that serve as the lifeblood in Russia’s numerous ‘mono-towns’, or towns relying on a single industry.
Like England’s Sheffield or Flint, Michigan before it, Pikalevo, a town of aluminium factories, has felt the full force of the economic crisis: almost half of its residents are now out of work.
“The town only exists because of this plant. So if it goes under, then the town will be lost and there will be looting and fighting in the streets”, says a man quoted in the article.
What will happen?
The BBC offers a rather sensationalist prediction:
The fear of serious unrest is growing as the May deadline imposed by the company approaches. And the big fear for the government is that the example set by Pikalevo could be copied by the hundreds of other “mono-towns” across the country, which are also fighting for their survival.
Unfortunately, recent history teaches us that such an outcome is very unlikely.
In 1984-85, British miners went on a nationwide strike to resist massive pit closures that would have destroyed hundreds of mono-towns just like Pikalevo. Despite an almost entirely unionised workforce, the tremendous political clout of the NUM, the huge mainstream popularity of socialist ideas at the time and a majority of public support, they were defeated by Margaret Thatcher.
As another BBC report put it, “both union and government dug in for a lengthy battle. In the end, the biggest losers were ordinary miners”.
Naturally, it would be silly to say that just because Thatcher was able to break the miners in 1985, Putin-Medvedev are also destined to crush the pikalevos. But if anything, the latter have more state power at their disposal than Thatcher did, and the former are much more desperate, weak and disorganised than their British predecessors.
In fact, I fear that perhaps the Spartacist uprising might yet turn out to be a more apt comparison.
