Alexei stakhanov biography of martin

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The New International, February 1936

N. Markin

From New International, Vol. 3 No. 1, February 1936, pp. 9–13.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

Its real meaning and the bureaucratic distortions

DURING THE night of August 31, Alexei Stakhanov, a coal miner, 29 years of age, peasant by birth, cut 102 tons of coal during a six-hour shift with a pneumatic drill, the average production being 6–7 tons.

(The best average production in Europe [Poland, Ruhr] is about ten tons, and the maximum, 16–17 tons.) The “Stakhanovist movement” dates its birth from that day.

Shortly thereafter, the Soviet papers blazed with reports about other record-breaking feats. Boussygin, a smith (at the Gorki automotive plant) forges 112–127 crank-shafts an hour (while the smith On This Day in 1935 the ‘Stakhanovite’ Movement Was Born KUS