This month marks the 20th anniversary of a massive wave of strikes that swept the Soviet Union, bringing half a million miners out in protest. The regime of Mikhail Gorbachev was collapsing, and the economy had reached a dead end under the dead hand of Stalinist bureaucracy.
The current economic crisis is different, in that so far we have not seen mass protests on the same scale. And this crisis is one of overproduction in a global free-market system.
The Russian stock market indexes have both topped 1,000 on the back of speculation that the oil price is holding up and the US recession is bottoming out. But these "green shoots of recovery" are not felt in the real economy. GDP dropped by 10.2 per cent in the first half of the year, and the real level of unemployment is 10 per cent and rising.
In the latest cutbacks, AvtoVAZ will shut down for August - and put its 100,000 workers on half-time for the next six months after that. Wages will be halved from an average of $400 per month - prompting one trade union to call a protest next week.
As their living standards are cut, workers will have even less money to buy back the goods they produce - further cutting demand and pushing the economy even deeper into recession. While the government currently has the resources to pay unpaid wages and get factories working again, it is not in the interests of business tycoons to do so, as they would rather hoard their wealth to pay off debts.
Actions to rein in big business, such as the theatrical humiliation of Oleg Deripaska in Pikalyovo last month, forcing him and other tycoons to reopen factories, are having a certain effect in putting off mass layoffs for now. But they also build up expectations that the government will step in to save various industries, and protect jobs and salaries. But it is not clear the government could do that if the oil price falls again.
A total of 99 strikes took place from January to May, compared with 93 in the whole of 2008, according to the Higher School of Economics. And in the first half of the year, nearly 400 social protests took place, according to the Institute for Collective Action.
Clearly, these figures are just the tip of the iceberg. To avoid a summer, autumn or winter of discontent, with many more people involved in protests, much more will have to be done - even if it takes more ritual humiliation for the oligarchs.
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