This Day in Labor History: September 19, 1935
By 
On September 19, 1935, a Soviet coal miner named Alexey Stakhanov mines 227 tons of coal. His work that day, beatified by the Soviet state as the saint to guide the new worker into the future, became such an ideal that the term Stakhanovite is synonymous with a communist worker engaging in work competitions to promote the state. But while this became emblematic of communist styles of work, it also appealed to regimes around the globe looking to transform the world of work into superhuman efforts to produce for the corporation or the state, as the case may be.
Stakhanov was not a particularly interesting figure really. He was born in 1906 in a small village and began working in the mines in his early 20s. He became a jackhammer operator in 1933 and in 1935 he started studying mining more carefully, engaging in some sort of state-sponsored training program. So on that famous day, he decided to test himself and with plenty of publicity around him, mined that 227 tons of coal. This made Stakhanov a celebrity, an idealized worker for the state.
Stalin and his cronies took Stakhanov’s feat and made it a national crusade. They had set production goals as part of the centralized planning the Soviets loved. But shouldn’t the worker freed from his constraints under capitalism work harder than ever for the revolutionary state? This Soviet state was no anarchist dream of workers freed to do whatever they wanted. Nope they would be as intensely managed as ever, just under a government theoretically there to support their basic needs through revolutionary doctrine.
Based on Stakhanov, Soviet workers began engaging in competitions, with a lot of state support, to see what one superhuman worker could do in a single shift. It spread throughout Soviet heavy industry over the next two months. In fact, the state so embraced the idea that in November, less than two months after Stakhanov’s stunt, it convened the All-Union Stakhanovite Conference at the Kremlin. The state started training managers in methods to continue this project and workers in how to produce (often in teams) enormous amounts of material in order to demonstrate to the general Soviet public the glories of the new workers’ state. For sure, most of this was about men at work, but there were some women engaged in Stakhanovite production methods as well, particularly in agriculture.
None of this is particularly surprising. The Soviets loved Henry Ford. The idea of turning workers into machines was equally appealing to American style capitalism, German style fascism, and Soviet style communism. All three systems saw Ford’s methods as the dawn of a new age. The individual worker meant nothing. The system meant everything. Workers had their destiny–supporting the state of the twentieth century. For the Soviets, this sort of thing became central to the Five Year Plans.
Unsurprisingly, workers were not super thrilled with all of this. Stakhanov himself was threatened by workers who said his was responsible for their lives getting worse. And much of it was of course not even really true. Stakhanov had not done all that himself like was claimed. But what did the state care? Whether communism, capitalism, or fascism, the truth matters very little. It’s what you can do with the story to spur people to do your bidding. And in fact, Stakhanov’s feat was not just promoted in the Soviet Union. As you can see above, he was on the cover of Time! The future of the hyper-productive worker was something Americans were just as interested in as the Soviets.
The best way to access what being a Stakhanovite meant is Andrzej Wajda’s 1977 film Man of Marble, a wonder for even existing in the late 70s Polish state, not to mention its excellent quality. The story is of a modern film student obsessed with finding a once-famous and now forgotten version of a Stakhanovite who became a famous brick layer. The story tells of his rise and fall once he starts questioning the state, a superb method to explore postwar Polish history while most of the people involved with it were still alive and telling a lot of uncomfortable truths. It’s an extraordinarily compelling film, both in terms of topic and execution.
For much of the rest of his life Stakhanov was feted by the state. He became a mining engineer and ran mines. He won the Order of Lenin too. Alas for him, he got into a drunken brawl at some point and lost his Order of Lenin. He died in 1977, at the age of 71. The Soviets soon renamed his home town Stakhanov. It’s in the eastern Ukraine, where the Russians have taken it back over in their grotesque invasions of that nation.
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