[Shadow_Group] In a World Below, Bedrock Resistance to Protests in Kiev

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

In a World Below, Bedrock Resistance to Protests in Kiev
By C. J. CHIVERS
nytimes
Published: November 30, 2004

DONETSK, Ukraine, Nov. 29 - Measured vertically, the commute to the 
bottom of the Trudovskaya mine is only 700 yards. The journey is roughly 
60 minutes long.

First, the men switch on their helmet lights and drop beyond halfway on 
an elevator that is little more than an open box falling through black 
stillness and chill. After the elevator, they ride a creaking rail car 
downhill for 15 minutes, exit and descend on foot for another 15 
minutes, walking on planks and muck and passing through doors that 
regulate the flow of air and gas.

At last they lie on their backs and are shot downward on a steeply 
sloped conveyor belt that, when switched to reverse, sends coal the 
other way. (The final drop - a long, fast descent on a springy rubber 
belt - has the weightless sensation of flight.)

They arrive at a chest-high chamber whose walls are a shiny black, deep 
within a vein of rich Ukrainian coal. They hunch over and begin to work, 
more than 2,000 feet beneath the earth.

In the seesaw postelection battle for the presidency of Ukraine, this 
sweaty end of the shaft, with its dim and dank air, thick with fine gray 
dust and the smell of split timbers and wet rock, amounts to a parallel 
universe. This is the territory of Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich, 
the nominal winner of the Nov. 21 presidential election that outside 
observers said was marred by fraud.

Donetsk is part of the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, a belt of coal 
and metal mines and heavy industrial plants, and its politics are 
largely controlled by a clan of post-Soviet industrialists who have 
backed Leonid D. Kuchma, the departing president, and Mr. Yanukovich, 
his personal pick as his successor.

The opposition may control Kiev, the capital. But as Viktor P. 
Sorokovoy, a veteran miner put it, "Kiev is not Ukraine."

Here the miners describe a political life that orbits around stability 
and uncomplicated ideas like working and getting paid on time. When Mr. 
Yanukovich was first their regional governor and then prime minister, 
the miners said, their salaries were paid on time. Their salaries also 
rose. Given the history of heavy industry in the former Soviet Union, 
which they rose up against in its last years, the miners view that as a 
feat.

Stability to them means incumbent power. "We are for Yanukovich," said 
Sergei P. Pashkov, a work brigade leader in charge of a shift of 160 
men. "That is the opinion of all of the mine."

The many divisions in Ukrainian politics could hardly be more stark than 
the difference between the daily life of Independence Square, in Kiev, 
and the pace in this coal mine.

One tactic used by Viktor A. Yushchenko, the opposition candidate, to 
force the prime minister to acknowledge the allegations of fraud 
surrounding his victory and stand for another vote has been a call for a 
national strike. The men of the Trudovskaya mine like to point out that 
there is in fact no national strike.

For more than a week, as Kiev has been swarmed by demonstrators, miners 
in the shafts of Trudovskaya (a euphonious derivative of the Russian 
word labor) have not missed a minute of work. They have kept digging, 24 
hours a day.

"Donbass does not stop," said Vladimir I. Letvinoff, the mine's chief 
engineer, who in his way speaks for a large part of Ukraine - even the 
most unfavorable surveys of voters leaving the polls gave Mr. Yanukovich 
43 percent of the vote on Nov. 21.

The extended fight for the presidency, and by extension the immediate 
future of Ukraine, is laden with many meanings. The opposition has tried 
to frame its battle as a contest pitting the standard-bearers of 
democracy against a strongman's election-rigging crooks. It is much more 
complicated than that.

This nation of 48 million feels as if it is rocking back and forth, and 
not just between candidates or even competing ideas. It is tugged 
between the past and the future, between its internal east-west 
divisions, between historic connections to Russia and aspirations to be 
European, between rival political clans, between the Russian language 
and the Ukrainian tongue, between the Russian Orthodox faith and an 
enduring Catholicism. It is also divided between those comfortable 
living in a centralized and disciplined form of post-Soviet government 
and a free-wheeling, flower-waving generation that at times has made 
opposition demonstrations feel like huge, cappuccino-charged dance parties.

(Ukrainian pop-rock, as it happens, is not as awful as its Russian 
fraternal twin.)

And down here in the mine, the men offer another and richly familiar way 
to frame their nation's political fight: the battle between Mr. 
Yanukovich and Mr. Yushchenko, they say, is between those who work and 
those who play. It is a timeless us against them, based on the 
information available to these men, who live in a region largely 
informed by state television and who are not aware of the size and 
energy of the protests.

"Students," Mr. Sorokovoy said, "should go back to school."

The miners say their prime minister won the race fairly, and those who 
complain of widespread fraud - as have Western election monitors and 
governments, and opposition demonstrators - are playing a dirty game. It 
is not Kiev that risks being disenfranchised, they say, but the men down 
in the hole.

"Imagine a miner, who worked his whole life, finding out his vote did 
not count," Mr. Sorokovoy continued, pushing his face in close toward a 
visitor and raising his voice. His first shift here was 51 years ago. 
"It is impossible. There is law."

Everything about what is happening in Kiev fills them with an almost 
allergic form of disgust, from the street protests to the public 
behavior of Mr. Yushchenko, whom they see as more stuntman than statesman.

As men who labor amid Soviet iconography (the entrance walls remain 
bright with the murals of thickly built miners, chins high beneath red 
stars, while Soviet-era production awards fill the mine's official 
museum), they reject the word revolution as a way to describe what the 
opposition has been trying. Revolution, they said, crouching in a circle 
around their rare visitor, has to be made by people with dignity.

Last week, Mr. Yushchenko, the opposition leader, appeared at an 
unofficial meeting of Parliament and administered the oath of office to 
himself on national television. No matter how the political crisis ends, 
for the miners that was too much, a sign that what they thought they 
knew about their country was slipping away.

"What would happen in America if John Kerry put his hand on the Bible 
and declared himself the president of the United States?" asked Anatoly 
P. Demeshchenko, a brigade leader. He let the question hang in the dirty 
air and darkness, unanswered, content simply to shake his head.

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