Hero of Socialist Labour

Establishment and early awards

The title Hero of Socialist Labour was instituted by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 27 December 1938, replacing the earlier title Hero of Labour. The decree defined the new title as the highest degree of distinction in economic and cultural construction, conferred on those who, through especially outstanding innovative work in industry, agriculture, transport, trade and scientific discovery or technical invention, rendered exceptional service to the state.

A recipient originally received the Order of Lenin and a diploma of the Presidium. To distinguish Heroes of Socialist Labour from other recipients of the Order of Lenin, the gold «Hammer and Sickle» medal was established by decree of the Presidium on 22 May 1940 and was awarded together with the order and the diploma.

The first award came a year after the title was created: on 20 December 1939 it was conferred on Joseph Stalin. The second recipient was the machine-gun designer Vasily Degtyaryov on 2 January 1940. The title was awarded only eleven times in 1939-1940 and 198 times (170 by another count) during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, when most recipients were weapons designers, scientists and top state leaders.

Conditions and privileges

The conditions of the award were revised several times. The Order of Lenin was at first handed out only once, on the occasion of the first award, and from 1940 a recipient could receive no more than three «Hammer and Sickle» medals. A decree of 3 March 1949 allowed a second medal for agricultural front-rankers, and bronze busts were to be built in the home districts of twice Heroes. In agriculture, a decree of 29 March 1947 granted the title to collective and state farm workers and machine and tractor station workers for high yields of wheat, rye, maize, sugar beet and cotton; further decrees in September 1947 extended it to high yields in livestock, potatoes and flax.

A decree of 6 September 1967 established a set of privileges for Heroes of Socialist Labour, Heroes of the Soviet Union and holders of all three classes of the Order of Glory; the list was expanded by a decree of 30 April 1975. These benefits survive under Russian Federation legislation. The statute approved by decree of 14 May 1973 removed the limit on the number of «Hammer and Sickle» medals held by one person, provided for the Order of Lenin with each such medal, and ordered that a bronze bust be erected in the home district of a Hero of Socialist Labour who was also a Hero of the Soviet Union.

The agricultural award campaign of 1947-1953

After 1947 the early exclusivity of the title changed dramatically. Faced with famine and a farm crisis after the war, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) decided on 19 March 1947 to confer the title on agricultural front-rankers for high yields, and a decree of 29 March 1947 defined the crops and production targets in detail. Thousands of rural workers became Heroes of Socialist Labour between 1947 and 1953, when the title was conferred 6,255 times in agriculture, including 2,497 awards in 1948 alone.

Recipients included field-team and brigade leaders, collective farm chairmen, state farm managers and district party and state officials. Because awards outside agriculture remained few, 6,313 of the 6,576 people who received the title in 1946-1956 were agricultural workers. For the first time the award became widely accessible to rural youth and women.

The scale of the campaign transformed individual farms. The «Krasny Oktyabr» grain collective farm in Kirov region had 17 Heroes of Socialist Labour in 1950, and a collective farm in the Makharadze district of Georgia produced the same number during the Fourth Five-Year Plan. In Ukraine, record-breaking collective farms restored grain production in villages devastated by the German occupation, and in 1948 the press reported that record grain harvests had brought the title to workers of the same machine and tractor stations that had once been accused of slack discipline.

Recipients and deprivation

Sixteen people became three-time Heroes of Socialist Labour. Among them were nuclear scientists and administrators such as Igor Kurchatov, Yulii Khariton, Andrei Sakharov, Yakov Zeldovich, Kirill Shchelkin, Boris Vannikov, Yefim Slavsky, Nikolai Dukhov, Anatoly Alexandrov and Mstislav Keldysh, the aircraft designers Sergey Ilyushin and Andrei Tupolev, and Nikita Khrushchev and Konstantin Chernenko. Yuri Gagarin, who made the first crewed spaceflight, received the title in 1961.

Only the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet could deprive a person of the title. On 8 January 1980 a decree of the Presidium stripped Andrei Sakharov of the title and all three «Hammer and Sickle» medals for anti-Soviet activity. Sakharov, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1965 who had helped found a human rights committee in 1970, received the three awards before that; during perestroika Mikhail Gorbachev informed him that a decree restoring his decorations was being prepared, but Sakharov replied that he would accept them only after all political prisoners in the USSR were released, and no decree was signed in his lifetime.

The title was in principle reserved for Soviet citizens. The German-born physicist Nikolaus Riehl is the exception among foreign nationals. Born in St Petersburg and trained in physics in Germany, he directed the production of pure metallic uranium at a secret plant at Oranienburg north of Berlin during the Second World War and after the war worked in the Soviet nuclear project. The closed decree of 29 October 1949, after the first Soviet atomic bomb test of 29 August 1949, made him a Hero of Socialist Labour with the Order of Lenin and the «Hammer and Sickle» medal.

Statistics and abolition

The title was conferred 20,747 times over Soviet history, but 89 people were deprived of it and decrees conferring it on 44 people were annulled as unfounded, leaving 20,615 Heroes, of whom 201 received the title twice and 15 three times. At least 20 recipients were honoured posthumously. Of the 20,370 awards made up to 1 July 1988, agriculture accounted for 12,441, industry for 4,856, construction for 1,076 and transport for 800.

Awards varied sharply by period: 8,395 people received the title between 1947 and 1958, 7,494 of them in agriculture, while of the 10,671 awards made between 1957 and 1974 agriculture accounted for 5,231, or about 49 percent.

Repeat awards were later curtailed. A decision of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 22 August 1988 stopped further conferral of the «Hammer and Sickle» medal, though recipients continued to work in production. The title was abolished in 1991 together with the Soviet award system. Its last recipient was the Kazakh opera singer Bibigul Tulegenova, honoured by decree of the President of the USSR on 21 December 1991. After the dissolution of the USSR, Russia established the title Hero of Labour of the Russian Federation in March 2013, while Ukraine did so in 1998 and Kazakhstan in 2008.

Diffusion abroad

Following the Soviet model, most countries of the socialist camp instituted analogous titles. Poland was the exception, where the Order of the Builders of People's Poland occupied a comparable place. Romania established a similar title on 4 May 1951, Bulgaria on 15 June 1948 and Czechoslovakia in 1952. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea created the title Hero of Labour rather than a Hero of Socialist Labour, and Vietnam likewise instituted a Hero of Labour title. These awards record the labour achievements of the working class in the socialist camp and the ways in which they were commemorated.