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Stakhanovism

The story of Alexey Stakhanov (1906-1977) is a marker of the centrality of the coalminer as a symbol of production in the 20th century. On August 31, 1935, Stakhanov, a pneumatic pick operator in the Tsentralnaya-Irmino mine in Kadievka, set a new “All-Union record” by digging 102 tons of coal in 5 hours and 45 minutes, at a time when the norm was around 6.5 tons per shift (Siegelbaum 1990: 66ff.). The scoop was due to a great extent to the initiative of Konstantin Petrov, the party organizer (partorg) at Central Irmino. However spontaneous, it came in handy for the Stalinist hierarchy, which, needing to increase the production quotas of the Five Year Plan, launched a “Stakhanovite movement” aimed first at increasing the output of mines in the Donbass region (ibid). Following in the steps of Stakhanov, all kinds of “heroes of the labour front” kept setting productivity records in any number of industries, projecting an image of material and political achievement built around the slogan “Life is joyous, comrades” (ibid 226). The craze reached the point where even demographic policy proposals in 1936 spoke candidly of rewarding mothers with many children as “Stakhanovites of child-bearing” (Siegelbaum and Sokolov 2000: 203, 100). The outcome of the campaign was mixed, at times lowering the quality of products and affecting wages and other workers. Critics of Stalinism, like Leon Trotsky, denounced the movement as secretly reintroducing the “piecework payment” principle and abolishing nonworking time, while further pampering bureaucrats (Trotsky 1972: 80). In the long run, ‘Stakhanovite’ has become an epithet to deride people who are overachievers in their jobs. The cultural effects of Soviet labour heroes were as contradictory as the movement itself. Stakhanovism was hailed by socialist realist artists and the emergent Soviet entertainment industry. Propaganda cartoons like Victorious Destination (1939), directed by L. Amalrik, D. Babichenko and V. Polkovnikov, instilled in Soviet children a belief in the economic superiority of the Soviet Union over the capitalist West, which became, in the post-war period, the most significant political fiction of the Soviet system. Similarly, Grigori Alexandrov, formerly a cameraman for Sergei Eisenstein and one of Joseph Stalin’s favourite directors, adapted the epics of overproduction to the American style musical. One does not need to subscribe the thesis that Stalin was “the immediate heir to constructivist poetics” (Groys 1992: 36) to be awed by the fact that Soviet avant-garde artists such as Gustav Klutsis and El Lissitzky devoted some of their best works of graphic design to Stakhanovist propaganda and the policies of the Five Year Plan, in part because their productionist ideology was compatible with the regime’s rhetoric of labour. In any event, Klutsis’s services to Stalinist propaganda did not spare him from being imprisoned and shot in a prison camp in 1938 (Wood 1992: 20). Neither did it forestall the demise of the Soviet avant-garde. CM