The World - News from Aug. 3, 1989

The leader of last month’s miners’ strike in western Siberia called for the creation of independent trade unions to replace official bodies he said are out of touch with workers. Teimuraz Avaliani, leader of the strike committee in the Kuzbass coal field of western Siberia, where the stoppage began, told the weekly Moscow News there is a need for an alternative workers’ organization. “You can’t get around it with cosmetic changes. We must create fundamentally new trade unions,” said Avaliani, a former trade union official who was fired and disgraced after criticizing then-Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev in the late 1970s.