From Moscow Times, 1 December 2009

In a bid to regain some power for organized labor, Boris Kravchenko, president of the All-Russia Confederation of Labor, the country’s second-largest union group, is leading his group’s 1.3 million members to a merger with another major independent group of about the same size, the Russian Labor Confederation, which is the country’s third-largest workers group. He said a unification conference, expected to take place early next year, would mark a turning point in the country’s labor movement, likening it to a famous strike by Soviet coal miners in 1989 that gave rise to independent unions.