USSR2 File: CPRF uses labor unrest to seize power, endorses general strike; Yabloko regional leader gunned down, bus bombed; Yukos liquidated

Soviet Strategists Implement Second October Revolution During Russia's 2007-2008 Political Season

In the classic anti-communist treatise, You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists), Fred Schwarz relates how communists can and have used labor strikes to shove capitalist countries into a pre-revolutionary situation and, through additional means of subversion, infiltration, fraud, and violence, install proletarian dictatorship, or a "state of the whole people." Writing in the early 1960s, Schwarz relates in Chapter Five, "Techniques for Seizing Power":

This method, their traditional method for the seizure of power, has not yet brought them success in any country. But it has been a most important adjunct to their seizure of power and rehearsals of the process have taken place in many countries.

The last great strike wave organized by the Communists for this purpose was in the year 1949. During that year there were world-wide, co-ordinated, organized strikes. There was a dock workers' strike in England when the British authorities expelled from Britain as an international Communist agent Louis Goldblatt, secretary-treasuser of the International Longshore Workers and Warehousemen's Union. The islands of Hawaii approached economic strangulation during the dockworkers' strike that year. In Australia there was a coal-miners' strike. These strikes were co-ordinated on a world-wide scale.

For many months we have been predicting that Russia's hidden communists masters will use a number of weapons, including terrorism, labor unrest, or another contrived "crisis," to dethrone the potemkin "party of power" United Russia, which was founded by "ex"-CPSU members, and openly seize the reins of power in a "Second October Revolution."

We are therefore not surprised that Farid Babayev, the leader of the Yabloko party's regional section in Dagestan, was gunned down today in an apparent assassination attempt. Babayev, state-run Russia Today reports, was hospitalized with critical injuries. Yabloko represents the marginalized "liberal" segment of neo-Soviet Russia's "political system." In another region of the war-weary Caucasus, namely North Ossetia, scene of the 2004 Kremlin provocation known as the Beslan school massacre, a bus was bombed, killing four. Neo-Soviet officialdom is recognizing this incident as a terrorist act. Three weeks ago on October 31 another bus was bombed in the southern Russian city of Togliatti, killing at least eight.

We are not surprised, too, that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation/Soviet Union is endorsing the dockworkers and Ford Motor Company employee strikes, both underway for an indefinite period in St. Petersburg. The dockworkers walked off the job on November 13, while Ford's Russian workers were locked out of their plant on November 20. With respect to the former, Reuters reports:

On November 13 St. Petersburg dockworkers launched an indefinite strike: Steel, metals and coal shipments from St Petersburg will be disrupted from Tuesday after dock workers in Russia's second-largest city launched an indefinite strike over a pay dispute. The strike will affect loading at the Sea Port of St Petersburg, owned by Russian billionaire Vladimir Lisin. The port shipped 11.7 million tonnes in cargo last year, or about a fifth of the total loaded by the bigger Port of St Petersburg.

St. Petersburg is Russia's historic "window to the West" and only large commercial port with access to the Atlantic Ocean via the Baltic Sea.

Ford's St. Petersburg plant opened in 2002 and manufactures the Focus line of cars. This is the fourth strike to hit Ford's Russian operations in two years. Another strike hit the state-managed AvtoVaz car manufacturer in Togliatti, in August: "The Yedinstvo union claimed that a strike Wednesday by several hundred workers had seriously disrupted production at AvtoVAZ’s giant Tolyatti plant." The Soviet Union formed AvtoVaz in the 1960s in collaboration with Fiat. AvtoVaz currently maintains a partnership with General Motors.

The independent St. Petersburg Times reports that Russian trade unions--even as their comrades in France and Germany, in keeping with Schwarz's analysis above, disrupt the European economy with transportation stoppages--are planning to "coordinate industrial action at a number of the region’s enterprises, including the railway, the mail, a brewery and a car manufacturer, ahead of elections to the State Duma on Dec. 2."

Unions Prepare Wave of Strikes
By Ali Nassor and Yekaterina Dranitsyna, Staff Writers
November 13, 2007

A wave of strikes is threatening to hit St. Petersburg as trades unions coordinate industrial action at a number of the region’s enterprises, including the railway, the mail, a brewery and a car manufacturer, ahead of elections to the State Duma on Dec. 2.

In one of the most bitter of the disputes, drivers working trains between Moscow and St. Petersburg have threatened strike on Nov. 28 if Oktyabrsky Railways Company, which operates trains on the line, fails to meet their demands.

The trade union representing the drivers has been challenging the employer to improve working conditions, raise wages and institute a role in the company’s decision-making process since June without success, Vitaly Zheltyakov, chief of the Russian Railway Motorist Brigades’ Trade Union which represents train drivers, said.

Sergei Khramov, chairman of Sotsprof, a national association of trade unions, said: “The trade union at Russian Railways announced a strike on Nov. 2, but then the strike was postponed for Nov. 28. We are looking for a real social partnership and for real negotiations. We want to come to an agreement.”

Zheltyakov declined to elaborate on the duration and nature of the strike, citing fears of the employer’s harassment of potential participants.

“They are smart in looking for pretexts to fire anyone who threatens their interests,” said Zheltyakov, who endured two years of court battles for re-instatement after he was fired in 1998 for inciting a one-week strike.

The train drivers are not the only workers threatening to strike in and around St. Petersburg as a wave of industrial action hits the region.

About 50 mail van drivers staged an eight-hour strike, halting delivery services, blocking Pochtamtskaya and Yakuboskaya streets near the Central Post Offices in the center of St Petersburg on Oct. 26 and causing a loss of about 1 million rubles to Russia Post, according to Maxim Rochshim, president of Russia Post’s trade union.

“They were demanding wage raises and reliable security on their vehicles that carry valuable parcels and cash, but three of them got fired instead,” he said.

Though Rochshim fell short of giving the administration a specific deadline to re-instate the fired colleagues, he did not rule out a wider strike by the end of the month if negotiations with the Post failed by Nov. 26.

Meanwhile, workers at Ford Motor Company in Vsevolozhsk, a town in the Leningrad Oblast, have confirmed they will stage an indefinite strike Nov. 20, if the plant’s administration fails to meet their demands before then. The demands include wage boosts, security and the improvement of working conditions.

Alexei Etmatov, Ford’s chief union representative, said the union had informed the company of the strike on Thursday, in concurrence with the Russian Labor Code obliging strikers to inform their employers of their intention 10 days before putting the plan into action.
It will be the fourth strike at the plant in two years.

Next Tuesday’s will be called in defiance of the Leningrad Court’s order, which required the 1,500-strong workers to postpone last Wednesday’s partially-held strike for 20 days to allow time for negotiations.

The plant which produces 300 cars in 24 hours has reportedly incurred a loss of about $5million as a result of the strike, according to Etmatov.

Other companies set to be hit by strikes in coming days include the St. Petersburg Fuel and Energy Complex, Heineken and Nevskiye Porogi, trade unionists told journalists on Friday.

They met with their union counterparts from the railway, the mail, and Ford at the Center for Independent Social Research, in order to work out strategies for a common front, but ended up with vague future plans.

Khramov sees at least two reasons why the strikes and organized meetings of workers emerged at the same time at several enterprises.

“Trade union members have planned to strike out at several oligarchs … at companies that ignore demands of workers,” he said.

Another reason for the strikes is that trade unions wanted to take a stand against the monopoly of Federation of Independent Trade Union (FNP), which is imposed on workers by the authorities, Khramov said.

“We see increasing monopoly of this organization, which is a comfortable and familiar negotiator for the authorities. Several trade unions decided to strike and show that FNP does not really control the situation,” Khramov said.

“I think that the opposite side will realize that it’s better to negotiate. I hope that we will be able to come to an agreement and avoid mass strikes at the railways,” he said.

“But we are ready for them. And it’s untrue that such strikes are illegal. The railways are not a medical institution, for example. It’s not a vitally important industry,” Khramov said.

Workers are also united in bitter reaction to the recent wave of consumer price hikes, which state officials describe as market conspiracy.

“What do you expect from the people whose income is at a standstill, but who have to face ever rising prices?” said Zheltyakov, downplaying suggestions that the strikes were a part of the ongoing election campaign.

“We are not moved by any political party, although we have occasionally enjoyed moral backing from the communist and Just Russia parties,” he said.

In a campaign appearance in St. Petersburg last week, Sergei Mironov, head of the Just Russia party and speaker of the State Duma, said: “I personally support them, and I think employers should immediately demonstrate their commitment to meet the demands of desperate workers.”

Trade union lawyer Rima Sharifullina said: “It’s not about the elections, it’s about the general trend of the employers ignoring civil rights and labor code.”

“Afterall, the ongoing strikes and their symptoms started long before election fever,” Sharifulina said.

Source: The St. Petersburg Times

The story above quotes Vitaly Zheltyakov, chief of the Russian Railway Motorist Brigades’ Trade Union, which represents train drivers, as saying, very slyly we might add: "We are not moved by any political party, although we have occasionally enjoyed moral backing from the communist and Just Russia parties." Indeed. The same story also quotes Russian trade union lawyer Rima Sharifullina as saying: “It’s not about the elections, it’s about the general trend of the employers ignoring civil rights and labor code. Afterall, the ongoing strikes and their symptoms started long before election fever."

This explanation for the strikes is disengenuous because the Soviet strategists have expended much propaganda since the fraudulent demise of communism to portray to Russians and the citizens of the world that all capitalism is "gangster capitalism," "oligarchism," and "fascism", to wit the Millionaires' Fair, an exhibition of luxury goods underway in Moscow. The Kremlin's Leninist masterminds have been enormously successful.

Even "ex"-CPSU President Vladimir Putin, who epitomizes the Russian business oligarchy in the communist press, lashed out at oligarchism in his rabble-rousing speech at a "fan club" convention yesterday. Russia Today reports: "President Putin has warned against attempts to restore the influence of the oligarchs in Russia. He told thousands of supporters in Moscow [on November 21] that the power-hungry tycoons had not gone away. He said they remained in the wings, waiting for an opportunity to regain their influence in Russia." Putin's disdain for capitalism is not only evident in his public speeches but in the final liquidation today of Yukos, Russia's biggest oil company founded by Komsomol businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky. BBC News reports: "The final move in the firm's history, it comes four years after its founder and former owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested on tax evasion charges. It's been one of the most controversial stories to have emerged from Vladimir Putin's Russia, and is seen by many as a key turning point in his rule."

Meanwhile, the international election monitors from the Kremlin-controlled Commonwealth of Independent States arrived in Moscow where they reported for duty to Ivan Melnikov, CPRF Vice Chairman. The CIS monitors will know what to look for, and what NOT to look for.