Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 22 – “Thirty years
ago, from May 21 to May 28, 1988, Soviet Sakhalin stood in the squares and
called the authorities to account for the impoverished condition of the people,”
Regnum’s Olga Demidenko writes. Protests spread across the region, and Moscow
was forced to fire the region’s obkom secretary, “an unheard of event in the
Soviet Union.”
She picks up (regnum.ru/news/polit/2417968.html)
on the memoirs of those day that have been assembled by a regional news agency,
KrabikMedia (krabik.media/2018/05/21/vosem-dnej-kotorye-potryasli-sahalin/)
and not insignificantly posts her article under the rubric “politics” rather than
“history,” an indication of the way the 1988 events echo today.
Until 1985, heavy government
subsidies meant that the people of Sakhalin lived far better than many of their
counterparts elsewhere in the USSR, people there recall; but then came Mikhail
Gorbachev and everything “began to change” and “not for the better” – the shelves
of stores emptied and by May 1988, “Sakhalin was in fact at the brink of
hunger.”
To be sure, no one died; but only
because they could go into the forests or to the rivers and sea and find food
for themselves. People had to stand in
long lines, and they were offended by the fact that the communist party elite
continued to live well and to do nothing, even as their own lives
deteriorated.
Vera Boltunova, described by Demidenko
as “a real participant of the Sakhalin Spring of 1988, a member of the CPSU, a
happy mother of three children, and an employee of the regional gas and oil
prospecting trust, says that everything began when the appeals of Moscow and the
actions of local officials diverged.
Moscow was talking all the time
about glasnost and perestroika and about the need to select “real leaders, “she
says; “but local party bosses demanded that people vote for the only candidate
they put forward. The opinion of rank and file communists wasn’t considered or
taken into consideration.”
Sakhalin residents were angry but
the trigger for the protests, Boltunova and others recall, was the visit to the
region of a central television journalist who invited people to come and talk
about their problems and “unexpectedly” said that the first secretary of the
CPSU Oblast Committee had been accused of “exceeding his authority.”
Petr Tretyakov’s crime? “He had given his own daughter an apartment
out of line.” Boltunova says that a
party boss would do that was no surprise but that a Soviet journalist would
talk about it and suggest that others do as well very much was. Then, obkom
officials made things worse: they expelled the journalist from Sakhalin.
That was too much under the
circumstances. On May 21, small groups of people began to assemble in front of the
local theater. And at the invitation of several
people in the crowd, they began to share their grievances which went far beyond
the heavy-handedness of the obkom secretary.
There
was no extremism in this, and some of the protesters, led by bulldozer operator
Sergey Mikhail kept order. After a few hours, they elected “an initiative group”
and it undertook to organize similar groups in workplaces and in
neighborhoods. The idea that the people
could take things into their own hands spread like wildfire.
By May 28, thousands of people from
around the oblast flooded into Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to take part in a mass meeting
whose slogans were: “Give us perestroika!” “Down with privileges” and “Raise
the militance of party organizations!” And participants said bluntly: “if the
authorities don’t understand how the simple people live, how can they run
things?”
“None of those knew then that an
enormous country, the USSR, had only three years left or that ahead of the
Sakhalin residents and everyone else of the rest of the Far East could look
forward to a real hell, which has passed into history under the name of ‘the
wild 1990s,’” Demidenko says.
“As Regnum has reported,” she continues,
“the incomes of citizens of today’s Russia have been falling for the last four
years. The government of the new-old prime minister Dmitry Medvedev is talking
seriously about raising the retirement age.” Many say that will create “a nightmare
for the country.”
And this tragedy of the people is
occurring when the new bosses are living well and amassing enormous wealth that
they claim they have “’honestly earned’” but that most believe they have stolen
from the people, the Regnum journalist says. As for Sakhalin, conditions are
again bleak.
The island’s residents “today just
as 30 years ago, are complaining about collapsing housing, about how new
construction quickly collapses because it isn’t being built up to standards,
about shabby hospitals, the lack of places in schools, and a whole range of
other misfortunes.
It is thus an open question,
Demidenko implies, if and when they will act as their parents did 30 years
ago.
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