THE old people of Tver, a city of 500,000 north of Moscow, have become national figures. In their attempts to draw attention to the non-payment of their pensions they have, every Tuesday, sat down on the main railway line between Moscow and St Petersburg.
Tomorrow they will be joined by an estimated 25 million Russians in a national day of protests and strikes to make the simple demand that workers be paid for their work and pensioners get their pensions.
The marchers and strikers will include pensioners, miners and public servants as expected, but private farmers, a relatively new phenomenon in Russia, will join in and so, too, will the "liquidators of Chernobyl".
These men went into the disaster area after the catastrophic accident in 1986 to face huge risks in cleaning up the nuclear mess. In Tula region, about 250 km south of the capital, 40 of these "liquidators" have gone on hunger strike in advance of the national protest in an attempt to get Mr Yeltsin's administration to pay them wages and compensation for the ill health most of them now suffer.
In Tver, Ms Viktoria Bondarenko (68), who moved to this city on the Volga 30 years ago from her native Ukraine, is one of the leaders of the pension protest. Her work as an activist has caused problems at home. "My husband says he wants a wife and not a revolutionary," she told me, but added with some pride: "The local governor, for all his power, is afraid of the old women of Tver."
The railway line protest has focused attention on the plight of Ms Bondarenko and her companions, but already a split has developed between those who have no political affiliations and activists from the Communist Workers' Party (KRP), a militant organisation far to the left of the opposition leader, Mr Gennady Zyuganov, and his Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF).
Ms Bondarenko will take part in tomorrow's demonstration, but her days sitting on the railway line are over. "I am not a party member; I am a free woman and I think now that we have been threatened with legal action we should stop blocking the trains," she said.
On the streets of Tver the pensioners and workers from the state sector gathered in the snow and cold - the Volga is still frozen over - to prepare for tomorrow.
The teachers, who have not been paid four three months, refused to talk mainly out of fear and xenophobia. One of them shouted: "In Russia we can sort things out ourselves. We don't need your foreign help."
The medical workers, who got paid specially on March 6th for International Women's Day, were more forthcoming. They were doing all right, they said, but they were worried about their patients. "Our equipment is on the point of collapse," said Ms Galina Vorobyova, a radiologist whose salary of $55 per month is usually paid three weeks late.
Dr Leonid Dmitriyev was angry at the rate of increase in TB cases, which, he says, have doubled in 12 months. Six or seven years ago he said there were general chest Xrays for everyone, but "now they don't do it. Tuberculosis is a social disease. It is a disease of poverty. Our children are weak and badly nourished. They are susceptible to TB."
None of the health workers I spoke to were members of any political organisation, but the KRP was very active on the fringes of the groups preparing for the big national demonstration.
In Moscow the chairman of the Federation of Independent Russian Unions, Mr Mikhail Shmakov, said he was wary that communist organisations would try to "assume the leadership of what is purely a trade union action" and said that the KPRF in the southern city of Stavropol already had shown its hand in that direction.
