COAL MINERS ON STRIKE IN RUSSIA, UKRAINE.

Byline: Alessandra Stanley The New York Times

Defying the president they helped bring to power five years ago, nearly half a million Russian coal miners went on strike Thursday to demand $200 million in unpaid wages.

So did 1 million coal miners in Ukraine, who say they are owed $367 million dollars in back pay.

The Russian strike, joined by about half the country's miners, carried particular political resonance, signifying far more than an economic setback for the government of President Boris Yeltsin.

In 1989, the Soviet coal miners' wildcat strike signaled the decline of Mikhail Gorbachev. Another major strike in 1991, which Yeltsin championed, helped topple Gorbachev and sweep his rival into power.

As miners in Ukraine's coal-rich Donets Basin stopped working to protest the wage halts and subsidy cuts of their free-market-minded government, 250,000 Russian teachers, who also were part of Yeltsin's original base, stayed away from schoolrooms for the second day in a row.

Unlike the strike in 1989, when miners demanded more consumer goods, this strike was over unpaid wages, one of the most widely shared grievances of Russian voters and one of the most politically sensitive issues of the presidential campaign.

Yeltsin is expected to run for re-election in June, and the strike is likely to play into the hands of his strongest opponents, the Communists.

The workers are also demanding that the government pay overdue subsidies to the mines. But much of the mines' money is owed not by the government, but by ailing industries that cannot pay for the coal they consume.

As he celebrated his 65th birthday Thursday, Yeltsin said nothing about the revolt of what had once been his most loyal constituency. He had already tried to head off the strike last week by signing a decree offering the coal miners $127 million in back wages, about half of what union officials say the miners are owed.

Saying Thursday that they had yet to see any of the promised money, the coal miners unions went ahead with the strike.

In the icy Arctic city of Vorkuta, Russia, 5,000 miners, teachers, railway workers and doctors gathered at a rally in the main square. Some held up signs reading, "Where is our money?" Others demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin.

Yeltsin's chief economic adviser, Alexander Y. Livshits, said Thursday night that the president had ordered his government to draw up a "tough, monthly schedule" to pay the miners.

The Russian independent television network NTV reported Thursday night that close to 75 percent of the country's coal concerns had joined the strike. It was not clear what the miners' plans were for prolonging the strike.

There was as much anxiety as there was defiance among striking miners Thursday.

"We have nothing to do, we have nothing to live on," a miner from the closed-down Gryzlovskaya mine in the region of Tula, told a Russian television crew Thursday. He said he would have to borrow money from his mother's pension check to buy bread.

Although coal miners are less essential to the Russian economy than they were five years ago, they are still vital to many Russian industries and provide the heat for 60 percent of Russian homes.

Once the symbol of mighty socialist labor, coal miners are now emblematic of Russia's steep industrial decline and a harbinger of public discontent. If the strike is prolonged, it will not only further damage Russia's ailing industrial economy, but it could have grave consequences for Yeltsin's political survival.

The coal miners have long been restive.