In the largest protest since President Boris Yeltsin was re-elected, hundreds of thousands of workers angered by unpaid wages walked off their jobs Thursday.
Marching behind red banners in hundreds of cities from Moscow to Vladivostok, long lines of workers paraded through the main streets and squares, demanding the government lead the country out of its economic crisis."Our patience has blown up," said Ivan Ivanov, 60, a retired shipyard worker in the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok who hasn't received his pension in three months.
Thousands of extra police patrolled streets in all major cities. However, as with previous strikes, the turnout appeared to fall well short of organizers' expectations of 17 million strikers nationwide.
The Interior Ministry reported 500,000 people participating by midafternoon. There were no reports of serious trouble, and the walkout was not disrupting any key industries.
Still, the strike, one of many in recent months, was the biggest public protest since Yeltsin was re-elected in July.
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin called it "a vivid indication of the acuteness of the accumulated problems," the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
He said help was on the way, though many Russians have grown skeptical of government pledges to pay billions of dollars in overdue pensions and wages.
In Moscow, about 10,000 demonstrators thronged off Red Square, waving Soviet flags with the traditional hammer and sickle and carrying banners denouncing Yeltsin and his top economic policy maker, Anatoly Chubais.
"Chubais - Pack Your Bags!" read one of the red banners. A few blue trade-union flags were interspersed.
Mikhail Shmakov, head the Russian Independent Trade Union Federation, which organized the protest, declared the strike a success. He claimed official reports minimized the size of demonstrations elsewhere.
Yeltsin's government has repeatedly failed to deliver on promises to pay wages and pensions that are months in arrears. The crisis affects millions of Russians.