Stakhanovite Movement
스타하노프 운동
The productivity movement launched by the miner Stakhanov's record coal shift in 1935. It raised output norms by showering record-setters with pay and privileges, and was criticized for creating a privileged stratum inside the working class.
In depth
The record of 1935
On the night of 31 August 1935 the miner Alexei Stakhanov of the Tsentralnaya-Irmino pit in the Donbas was reported to have cut 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift. The figure was announced as fourteen times the standard output and was carried across the country by Pravda within days.
The record was not a matter of individual skill alone. Stakhanov worked under a division of labour in which he concentrated on cutting with a pneumatic drill while other workers handled the timbering and haulage. The record was therefore the product of a reorganization of work, and the movement's official account duly stressed the mastery of new technique and new working methods.
Institutionalization
From late 1935 the Stakhanovite movement spread to every sector. Record holders were designated in each industry and given wage bonuses, priority in housing and consumer goods, decorations, and invitations to conferences. Piece-rate systems were extended, with steeply progressive rates applied to output above the norm.
The essential mechanism was the raising of norms. Once a record demonstrated what was attainable, the standard output norm for that sector rose, squeezing the real earnings of the majority who had been paid against the previous norm. The norm revision of 1936 is the clear case, and from that point the movement was a means of wage discipline as much as of raising output.
Conflict and assessment
Friction on the shop floor was considerable. Concentrating resources on a record encroached on the materials and equipment allotted to other sections, and rising norms cut colleagues' earnings, so hostility toward Stakhanovites arose. Managers were caught between their plan indicators and the demands of supporting records, and the literature of these years frequently casts resistance to record-setting as sabotage.
Trotsky criticized the movement as a device for building a privileged layer inside the working class and hardening hierarchy. This argument about the formation of a labour aristocracy became one of the grounds in later debate over the nature of Soviet society. Soviet accounts presented the movement conversely as an expression of worker creativity and socialist emulation, and the opposition between the two readings connects to the larger question of how to regard wage differentials and labour discipline.