Stakhanovite
stuh-KAH-nuh-vyte
noun
A particularly hard worker
Alexei Grigoryevich Stakhanov was born in 1906 in a large village in the northwest of what was then the Russian Empire. In his early twenties, some time after the Romanov family were led into a basement in Yekaterinburg and the Tsarist regime had come crashing to the ground, he started work as a coal miner.
Coal mines, like a great deal else in the Soviet Union, were operated by the state, and had strict monthly production targets. If these targets were missed, local managers or Communist Party officials would be in deep trouble - one-way train tickets to Siberia were easy to come by. The coal mine where Stakhanov worked, in what is now Ukraine, was one of the worst performing in the region.
In the 1930s coal mining was not the heavily-mechanised process it has become today, and miners would lie on their sides or their back hacking away at the rock face with a single pickaxe. The coal that was collected was loaded onto carts and pulled out of the mines by ponies.
Stakhanov’s brainwave, and what made him famous, was twofold. First, hand-operated pickaxes should be replaced with a mining drill, which at the time was something of a novelty. Stakhanov had received special training on how to use these drills and was keen to see their use rolled out more widely. Second, he wanted to split the mining process into different roles, with one miner actually doing the drilling, a second focussing on loading the carts, a third propping up the roof of the mining tunnels (terrifying) and a fourth leading the pit pony in and out. The manager of the mine had doubts about this but eventually Stakhanov persuaded his bosses and local Communist Party officials to let him give it a go, and on the 30th of August 1935 Stakhanov and colleagues finished their shift having mined a staggering 102 tons of coal, more than 14 times the production target.
Stakhanov was instantly lavished with praise and attention, and an article in the official newspaper Pravda praised ‘the Stakhanov method’. Naturally this brought Stakhanov to the attention of Josef Stalin, who approved of his new method and rolled it out across the Soviet Union.
In the following months and years Stakhanov toured the country and recruited thousands of workers from all branches of Soviet agriculture and industry who became known as Stakhanovites. Eventually Stakhanov was given a position in the Soviet coal ministry, where he remained for several years until Nikita Kruschev, seeing no further use for him, dismissed him and sent him back to Ukraine.
Stakhanov received all sorts of honours and awards throughout his life. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1935 (we must remember this was before the Cold War had really kicked off), twice received the Order of Lenin and was finally awarded the highest honour for Soviet citizens, the Hero of Socialist Labour. Whether Stakhanov ever actually mined as much coal as we are led to believe is a matter of some historical debate, and in the absence of Pravda Verify™, we must make up our own minds.
Stakhanov provided the inspiration for Boxer, the hardworking horse who is eventually turned into glue in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.