Russians have made an art of getting their complaints heard

Press, 18 November 1981, Page 17

Russians have made an art of getting their complaints heard

By

MARK FRANKLAND

from Moscow

A forum for workers’ complaints that are hair-rais-ingly outspoken by old Soviet standards, and the anguished letter of a cripple who has fought unsuccessfully for 11 years to get a ground-floor flat, suggest how urgent, and yet sometimes how difficult, it is for Soviet authorities to give expression to popular grievances. Workers in factories and farms have in recent months been given a chance to criticise their bosses and local government officials in “Open Letter Days.” Complaints boxes are put up a few weeks before a meeting at which all the criticised parties are supposed to be present. The country’s trade union paper “Trud,” a chief organiser of the campaign, has reported on many of the meetings, certainly to the astonishment — and presumably also the delight — of its readers. At the first meeting in one factory, “Trud” reported, “it was evident that the factory management had not anticipated such a stormy beginning.” Some of the answers were as straight as the questions.

Why was the factory short of tools? Because, a manager explained, the factory “has to buy part of its tools on the black market; the quality of them is poor, and they wear out sooner than they should.”

But other answers, “Trud” wrote, were “slick,” “superficial,” and “obviously just excuses.” Some of them were met with “incredulous laughter from the hall.”

The paper has written scathingly about officials who avoided the meetings. “The deputy director for consumer services did not consider it necessary to attend; he appeared to have made some mistake about the time.” And of another occasion: “People were hoping to hear answers from the chairman of the local soviet (town council). He had been invited to attend the meeting in good time, but had found it impossible to spare even half anhour of his time to meet the workers.”

The complaints cover many of the daily problems of Soviet life. Why is there so little meat in the shops? Why is it so hard to see the polyclinic doctor? Why can’t the factory have its own grocery order service? Why are bus time-tables so inconvenient?

They are scarcely revolutionary; and it is also true that there has long been a complaints machinery, chiefly through the letters departments of local and national newspapers and also in Party offices. However, the present campaign certainly represents a new at-

tempt to channel grievances that are likely to persist, given the country’s economic problems. The importance of the experiment, which began a year ago, has been made plain beyond doubt by references to it in Central Committee documents and by the publicised patronage of Konstantin Chernenko, Leonid Brezhnev’s chief of staff in the Politburo. . .

There is still evidence of how unhappy the fate of a Soviet citizen can be if his complaints do not fit official channels. A letter has just reached the West from Faizulla Khusainov, who is condemned to a wheelchair by spinal injuries, describing his unsuccessful attempt to move out of the one-room, second-floor flat without lift or telephone that he shares with his mother in Chistopol, in central Russia.

After many attempts to be given a flat on a ground fluor he made the difficult journey to Moscow. He went to the reception office of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Parliament, which is the highest body for citizens’ complaints. An official (whom he had

seen two years earlier) refused to listen to his case and would not even accept a letter he had written to Brezhnev. “If you can get to Moscow yourself,” he reports her as saying, “that shows you can perfectly well get down from the second floor.” (In fact friends had carried him down, driven him to the station, and put him on the train.)

Khusainov then set out for the offices of the. Soviet Procurator General. Passersby pushed him in his chair part of the way but he was stumped by the underpass on Gorky Street in the city centre, which he had to cross to get to the Procuracy. “It was necessary for us to wait far into the night till the traffic died down enough for us (Khusainov and a helpful passer-by) to cross above ground. The passer-by could not wait, so he left, and I was alone. Night came on and it grew cold. A streetwatering machine went past and covered me with water from head to toe. Not until five o’clock in the morning did a passer-by help me across to the other side of the road and I found myself outside the U.S.S.R. Procuracy.”

Rejected there, too, he was eventually sent to a hospital where he stayed for nine days without treatment before being allowed to go home, and then only because a kind nurse went to buy his air ticket for him. Why the differences between a Khusainov and a worker who stands up at an Open Letter Day and complains that there is no meat? Part of the answer is that Khusainov is a member of the four-man Initiative Group to Defend the Rights of the Disabled in the U.S.S.R. set up three years ago.

In his case an unsuccessful fight for his rights pushed him into organised action independent of the authorities,. and so into near dissent. This is also the case with a variety of religious dissidents whose attempt to practise their faith as they believe necessary also brought them into unplanned conflict with the Government.

Open Letter Days, while of little help to the Khusainovs who are already scarred by battling with the authorities, are clearly partly meant to satisfy workers who otherwise might be drawn towards the embryo free trade unions which, though tiny in membership, have now a disquieting Polish ring about them.—Copyright, London Observer Service.