How Russian workers spread the word
 
ALEX CHIS, a member of the editorial committee of Independent Politics in
the United States, was in Moscow in October to attend the international
labour conference ``Modern Telecommunications: New Vistas for Workers'
Solidarity'', which was primarily organised by the KAS-KOR Labour
Information Centre. He describes what labour movement activists are doing to
establish their own lines of communication.
 
KAS-KOR is an independent centre which exists to spread information on the
workers movement in the ex-USSR. Just three years old, it got its start
during the coal miners' strikes in 1990 when, as Kirill Buketov, one of the
main organisers of KAS-KOR, said in an interview in Independent Politics
magazine:
 
``It was a big problem for strike committees to organise an exchange of
information and how to cooperate because the USSR was a big country. When in
one city the strike only started, in another city the strike was finished.
It was a very big problem to organise a coordination of activity in
different cities. And our official newspapers and magazines and radio and TV
gave only false information.''
 
The fact that the conference took place at all is a tribute to KAS-KOR's
determination. Yeltsin's coup and the state of emergency threw the
proceedings in doubt, but they decided too much work had taken place in the
planning and organisation of the conference, and they would go ahead anyway.
 
Just one week before the conference was to begin, the army took over the
conference site. Organising furiously, with the help of friends such as
Vassily Balog, of the International Department of the General Confederation
of Trade Unions, KAS-KOR was able to find an alternative site, at a trade
union school in the village of Saltikovka, just outside of Moscow. They also
had to organise a special bus for participants, all this during a curfew and
state of emergency.
 
Among the speakers was Anatoly Voronov, the head of Glasnet, a computer
network with links to Peacenet in the United States and Pegasus in
Australia. During the events around the coup, while the print media were
censored, he put out Glasinfo via electronic mail, making available many of
the stories which had been censored from the print media.
 
This made some of his friends in the West concerned for his safety. But as
Anatoly said, when Glasnet USA ``sent me a message worrying about the
censorship in Russia, and asking whether Glasnet ought to be more
circumspect in the coverage of the situation in Russia, I checked the
Russian Law on the Press, and discovered that electronic networks are not
included in the list of mass media.''
 
Vassily Balog spoke on ``Modern Technologies: New Possibilities for Workers'
Solidarity''. During the coup Vassily put out information on the arrests of
Boris Kagarlitsky and other leaders of the Party of Labour to computer
bulletin boards, facilitating the mass response leading to their release. He
is the moderator of a computer conference on labour in the ex-USSR.
 
These two typified the type of speakers at the conference, not just computer
experts but participants in the movement as well. People from throughout
Russia, from Kazakhstan and Lithuania, as well as the West, participated.
Although attendance was cut by the October events, the conference was a
success by any standards.
 
KAS-KOR is an activist group consisting of a few paid staff and a much
larger group of volunteers in Moscow, ages averaging from 21 to 28, who have
so many projects it's hard to keep up with them. They do a weekly labour
radio show, on the major radio station in the ex-USSR with a potential
listenership of about 300 million, which has to be the most widely heard
labour show in the world. They produce a weekly Russian-language bulletin of
news on the workers movement, which is distributed to about 500
organisations. Their network of about 300 correspondents throughout the
ex-USSR supplies the news.
 
They have just begun a new project, producing an attractive new quarterly
English-language magazine, Russian Labor Review. RLR is able to cover the
events and debates in the labour movement throughout the ex-USSR in a
comprehensive way.
 
Like KAS-KOR itself,  is thoroughly non-sectarian, with articles from a wide
variety of viewpoints. For anyone at all interested in the ex-USSR or the
international labour movement, it's a must.
 
Subscribers also demonstrate solidarity with the workers movement in Russia,
and help KAS-KOR in its work of spreading the word on workers' struggles
throughout the ex-USSR and the world. It is hoped that the financial success
of this project will make it possible to begin other projects, such as the
new Russian language newspaper, Workers' Action, a joint project of KAS-KOR
in Moscow and the NERV centre in St Petersburg.
