The Miners' Moscow Connection

By Jay D. Palmer

Soviets offer food, cash and vacations to help fuel a strike

It has been a classic thaw. Ever since British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proffered an olive branch to the Soviet Union over a year ago with the comment that "we have to live together on the same planet," relations between London and Moscow have steadily improved. According to some, this detente not only has helped spur the renewal of U.S.-Soviet arms talks but has also produced diplomatic rewards for Britain: on Dec. 15, Politburo Member Mikhail Gorbachev will lead a delegation to Britain. This will be followed next year by a visit from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.

But there is another, darker side to current Anglo-Soviet relations that some Britons see as crude interference in British affairs. Recently, an official of the National Union of Mineworkers announced that the Soviets have donated $1.3 million in cash, food and clothing to help the N.U.M. members continue their bloody nine-month-old strike. This follows a summer when more than 100 mineworkers and their families were provided with free vacations at a resort on the Black Sea. A week ago it was revealed that Arthur Scargill, the militantly Marxist leader of the miners, had made several secret visits to the Soviet embassy in London, apparently in an effort to win greater Soviet support. The Soviets, however, appear to have stopped short of granting one Scargill request -- to halt their coal and oil exports to Britain.

With the miners slowly drifting back to work, Scargill is going to need lots of help wherever he can find it. A month ago he turned to Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi for aid -- although, apparently, none has yet been received -- and he now appears to be seeking continued Soviet support. The Kremlin is not without sympathy for the miners' leader: last year, while visiting Moscow, Scargill noted that the threat to world peace came from that "most dangerous duo, President Ray-Gun and the plutonium blond, Margaret Thatcher." He also attacked the outlawed Polish trade union Solidarity as "an anti-socialist organization which desires the overthrow of a socialist state."

But whether or not fresh Soviet financial help is forthcoming, the tide in the bitter coal strike is turning against the union. In the past three weeks, more than 13,000 striking miners have quit the picket lines. Compared with the early days of the strike, when only 40,000 of the nation's 189,000 N.U.M. members were working, more than 63,000 are now back at their jobs, according to the government's National Coal Board. Hundreds more are returning every day. "Follow me on the road to sanity," urged John Cunningham, a longtime local officer of the N.U.M. in Northumberland, as he went back to work on Nov. 19, one of 2,282 to do so that day. "These strike leaders are hell-bent on destruction."

At one level, the Soviet connection pleases the Thatcher government, providing headlines in the press and questions in Parliament slanted against the miners. At the same time, however, it calls attention to a recent episode that London and Moscow would rather forget. At the end of October, eight days after Thatcher announced the Gorbachev visit, a Soviet trade union official appeared on the main Soviet evening TV news program Vremya to announce a total embargo of Soviet fuel exports to Britain. Five days later the embargo was firmly denied by the Soviets, and it was passed off by British diplomats as a mistake by an overenthusiastic functionary.

Both sides want to leave it at that. Even though Scargill claimed last week that the embargo was continuing, the Kremlin was noticeably silent on the subject. Though Britain sees no possibility of a cutoff, it still wants no talk about any thing that could threaten the large quantities of Polish coal that it needs in order to help keep its power stations running this winter. And Moscow is highly sensitive to charges that it uses energy for blackmail. Embargo or no, the fact that the Soviets made the threat gives West European governments good reason to recall the Reagan Administration's past warnings: that their increased dependency on Soviet natural gas makes them vulnerable to Moscow's threats.

-- By Jay D. Palmer. Reported by Erik Amfitheatrof /Moscow and Arthur White/London

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof, Arthur White