Arctic miners stake claim for power: Andrew Higgins in Vorkuta meets rival 'directors' of Russia's biggest coal mine whose bitter fight for control is helping to tear the country apart

FAR from the chatter of Moscow's feuding politicians, Tatyana Odintsova sits, quite literally, in the middle of what may prove the real struggle for Russia's future, caught in one of countless local battles that are tearing the country, not just the Kremlin, apart.

Mrs Odintsova is personal secretary to the director of the Vorgashorskaya Coal Mine, a huge colliery near the Arctic town of Vorkuta. Her job used to be straightforward: typing, taking telephone calls and keeping the director's diary. That was before she had two bosses, each calling himself director, each one giving orders, each one telling Mrs Odintsova and 5,000 other workers to ignore what the other says.

In an office to the right of Mrs Odintsova's desk, sits Ivan Guridov, local leader of the Independent Union of Miners and self- styled 'people's director'. Aside from five days in jail, he has sat in the director's chair for a month now, ever since he broke the lock, prised open the door and declared himself master of Russia's biggest mine. He has also hijacked the management sauna downstairs.

To the left of Mrs Odintsova's desk, next to a potted plant, stands a second office. The door has a red plaque with gold letters saying Chief Engineer but the man who works behind it, Vladimir Shurgo, insists only he has the right to run the mine. He took over after the original director fell ill.

Each 'director' commands his own battalion of supporters. Backing Mr Guridov, who wears a Gulf war souvenir wristwatch and a silk paisley tie, are militant miners who demand total control of the pit and dismiss opponents as unreconstructed Communists. Behind Mr Shurgo stand administrators and engineers, as well as the Ministry of Fuel and Energy in Moscow. For them, Mr Shurgo is the last line of defence against a mob of modern Bolsheviks bent on seizing power through violence.

Mr Odintsova, the secretary, sides with the second camp. When Mr Guridov first declared himself director after a ballot by 176 trade union delegates, she hid the keys in her bra to prevent him getting into the office. The following day, he smashed the door open.

In some ways, the feud mirrors the struggle in Moscow, where Mr Yeltsin is locked in a constitutional row with parliament over where ultimate power should lie. But here, in the former penal colony of Vorkuta, the struggle is far more raw and more confused. The result of both battles, though, is the same: paralysis. Mr Yeltsin's power is slipping away. In Vor kuta, too, no one is in charge. Mr Guridov issues orders only coal- face workers obey. Mr Shurgo does the same and gets ignored by all but staff on the surface.

Vorkuta police tried, briefly, to intervene. But they, too, seem powerless. Late last year, they lost their headquarters in an arson attack by local Mafia and seem wary of making new enemies. Recently they arrested Mr Guridov on charges of slander but let him go after an underground sit-in by several hundred miners.

Political squabbling in Moscow produces words. The mine dispute 1,200 miles away in Vorkuta produces real, immediate damage, threatening coal supplies to key industries in St Petersburg and other parts of western Russia. Production at the Vorgashorskaya, the biggest of Vorkuta's 13 pits, has plummeted. After a string of wild-cat stoppages, the latest of which was announced yesterday, output last month was about half its normal daily level of 15,000 tones.

In 1989 and again in 1991, when Vorkuta's Vorgashorskaya pit was at the forefront of national coal strikes, the issue seemed clear-cut: miners wanted the Communist Party and Mikhail Gorbachev out, the democrats and Boris Yeltsin in. Today, nothing is clear.

Mr Guridov, the trade union leader, insists the struggle of 1989 and 1991 remains unfinished: 'Power should have been taken from the old guard not just in Moscow but in every region and city.' The whole mine, he says, must be privatised, not just 40 per cent of it as suggested by Moscow.

His free-market rhetoric, though, jars with another message: 'The mine must be run by and for the miners . . . I oppose selling out to an owner who will tell the workers what to do.'

Mr Guridov also wants hefty pay rises for his miners, who already earn more than 15 times the national average wage. He says he favours selling coal abroad, where the price is 10 times higher than in Russia, but only if middle-men play no part.

His rival, Mr Shurgo, sneers at such talk as primitive Communism dressed up in free-market clothing. He denies any loyalty

to the old Communist order, but insists the mine must stay in

state hands and talks darkly of hidden 'commercial structures' manipulating the trade union leader. 'As soon as he stops being useful they will thrown him away too.'