Abstract
The term ‘Stakhanovism’ immediately conjures up pictures of Soviet industrial workers of the 1930s who emulated the feats of Aleksei Stakhanov, a miner who throughout the night of 30–31 August 1935 hewed fourteen times his quota of coal. Stakhanovism was named after him and can usefully be defined as a movement to increase labour productivity to the point of encouraging maximum productivity.1 It exceeded shock work, which was also an over-fulfilment of norms but not necessarily to the ‘maximum’. A picture that is not generally triggered by the concept of Stakhanovism is one of milkmaids trying to obtain more milk from their cows, or pig-breeders attempting to ensure that more piglets are born and survive, or tractor drivers ploughing more hectares than before. None the less, the Soviet regime did attempt to spread the Stakhanovite movement to the countryside, with mixed results. Hitherto little has been written on this.2
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Notes
Discussions of industrial Stakhanovism include Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanov-ism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, 1988).
Vladimir Andrle, Workers in Stalin’s Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy (Hemel Hempstead, 1988).
and Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (London, 1986).
See, for example, Mary Buckley, ‘Krest’yanskaia gazeta and Rural Stakhanovism’, Europe-Asia Studies, December 199, pp. 1387–1407; and Mary Buckley, ‘Why Be a Shock Worker or a Stakhanovite?’, in Rosalind Marsh (ed.), Women in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 199–213.
See, for example, James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985).
Pasha Angelina, My Answer to an American Questionnaire (Moscow, 1949), p. 22.
I. Vershinin (ed.), Mania Safronova Demchenko (Moscow, 1938); a centner is 500 kilograms; a hectare is 2.471 acres.
P. Angelina, Liudi kolkhoznykh polei (Moscow and Leningrad, 1952),p. 13.
Roberta Manning, ‘Women in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World War II, 1935–1940’, in Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola(eds), Russian Peasant Women (New York, 1992), p. 220.
Iurii Il’inskii, ‘Iunaia Stakhanovka’, in L.I. Stishova (ed.), V budniakh velikikh stroek: zhensluhiny-kommunisty geroini pervykh piatiletok (Moscow, 1986), p. 57.
Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 2nd revised edn (New York, 1972), p. 279.
Moshe Lewin, The Making of Soviet Society (London, 1985).
Moshe Lewin, ‘On Soviet Industrialization’, in William Rosenberg and Lewis Siegelbaum (eds), Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization (Bloomington, IN, 1993), p. 272.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994), pp. 287–96.
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Buckley, M. (1999). Categorising Resistance to Rural Stakhanovism. In: McDermott, K., Morison, J. (eds) Politics and Society under the Bolsheviks. International Council for Central and East European Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27717-9_10
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