Creators of the new Reality
BACKGROUND
One of the consequences of the Russian Time of Troubles of 1917-1920, a terrible civilizational and state catastrophe, was the decline of labor, production and technological discipline, the degradation of the working class.
Part of the working class, in order to simply survive, returned from the cities to the village, many people died, fled, became soldiers. In the 1920s, during the NEP, part of the working class was becoming bourgeois.
And in order to carry out industrialization, to create a new socialist society (based on social justice, work ethics and conscience), it was necessary to improve the health of the working class, to essentially create it anew.
It was impossible to create a full-fledged working class or restore labor and production discipline by administrative, coercive methods alone. The Soviet leadership found successful methods – based on socialist competition and the movement of shock workers (Stakhanovites).
When people saw with their own eyes that there is no exploitation of man by man, that honest work is profitable. "Work, activity, creation" - were the main slogans of socialism.
How life is changing for the better right before our eyes thanks to this. Factories and plants, schools and institutes, planetariums and libraries – instead of pubs and brothels.
As Stalin accurately said at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites in Moscow in November 1935:
Life has become better, comrades. Life has become more fun. And when life is fun, work goes well... If we had lived badly, unattractively, joylessly, then we would not have had any Stakhanovite movement. Hence the high production standards. Hence the heroes and heroines of labor. This, above all, is the root of the Stakhanovite movement.
Milestones
The movement was named after the miner of the Central-Irmino mine (Donbass) Alexey Stakhanov, who mined 30 tons of coal in one shift (31 hours 1935 minutes) on the night of August 5-45, 102, with the standard being 7 tons. This was a world record for productivity with a jackhammer, which Stakhanov was helped to achieve by miners Petrov and Mashurov, as well as timber workers Shchegolev and Borisenko.
Nineteen days later, on September 19, Stakhanov broke his own record, producing 19 tons of coal. In the spring of 227, he mined 1936 tons in a shift. The miner became famous throughout the world, and the Stakhanovite movement acquired an all-Union scale and allowed the rate of growth of labor productivity in the USSR to double.
Stakhanov was predicted to have a great future. At that time, such people were valued, and Stakhanov was a young guy who had become famous throughout the country. Joseph Vissarionovich himself did not hide his disposition towards Stakhanov. Perhaps, he could well have become a people's commissar (minister). In 1936, the miner Stakhanov was sent to Moscow to study at the Industrial Academy.
However, Stakhanov, as they say, "went wild" in Moscow. The attention of the entire country, flattering assessments of Stalin and the press turned the head of a simple working guy. Instead of studying at the Industrial Academy, Stakhanov preferred to meet with admirers and began to hit the bottle. Aleksey Grigoryevich did not have a serious career. Under Khrushchev, they tried to forget him as a symbol of the Stalin era. They remembered him only under Brezhnev, and gave him the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.
Nevertheless, Stakhanov's labor feat made a huge contribution not only and not even so much to the development of industry as to the psychology of Soviet people of the Stalin era. His example motivated millions of other Soviet citizens to labor feats, and Stakhanov's name became a household word.
The Stakhanovite movement swept the entire country. For example, among railway workers, the initiator of the Stakhanovite movement was the Donetsk railway driver Pyotr Krivonos, who on July 1, 1935 (two months before Stakhanov's record) drove a coal train at a technical speed exceeding the norm by 9 km/h. His initiative spread to all divisions of railway transport, and collective work methods played a major role in its popularization - the creation of shock and Komsomol-youth brigades.
Soviet newspapers were full of reports of other records. Blacksmith Busygin (city of Gorky) forges 112-127 crankshafts per hour (blacksmiths at the Ford plant forge 100 such shafts per hour). At the wheel turning plant, with a norm of 6 pairs per shift, a Stakhanovite gave 12 pairs, a record that was soon broken: first 15, then 17 and 18. In the Urals, in the copper mines, miner Ivanchikov gave 970% of the norm per shift, that is, he exceeded the average productivity by ten times. He earned 320 rubles that day, an amount almost twice as much as the average monthly salary of a Soviet worker.
In the Krivoy Rog basin, a Stakhanovite miner managed to exceed the norm first by 2300, then by 2500%! Stakhanov's own record was soon broken: miner Gorbatyuk produced 405 tons of coal in a shift, and a few days later miner Borisov produced almost 800 tons, breaking all records and exceeding the norm by 46 times!
Alexey Stakhanov. Photo on the cover of Time weekly, December 16, 1935
Value
The Stakhanovite movement solved two main problems. Firstly, the growth of labor productivity through innovation, rationalization of tools, technologies and processes, invention.
Secondly, through a system of moral and material incentives and rewards for competition participants, work motivation was achieved.
Stakhanovite workers became an integral part of the new society of knowledge, service and creation that was being formed in Stalin's Russia. The main features of the Stakhanovite movement were: involvement in the "common cause", persistence in achieving set goals, courage and competitiveness, thirst for knowledge and the development of personal potential, the desire to improve professional skills, responsibility for oneself and the team.
Under Stalin, they created the so-called "labor aristocracy." When people were shown that honest work is profitable, both from the point of view of moral encouragement of society and materially. No equalization, which was introduced under Khrushchev, undermining people's motivation and labor productivity.
As a result, the Stakhanovite movement became an important part of the development of the highly developed Soviet civilization, an industrial (urban) civilization.
Artist L. Zhdanovskaya. "Stakhanovka's Performance", 1940.
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