(See front cover & pictures, pp. 26 & 27).
Into the world's vocabulary and stock of notions restive Russians have injected "kulaks," "FiveYear Plans." "Ogpu" and State-sponsored "Godlessness." Last week the Soviet Union was busy winding up 1935 with Russia's most recent and most sweeping innovation since the so-called "liquidation of the kulaks" and "fulfillment of the First Five-Year Plan." The great new addition to vocabularies: Stakhanovism. To liquidate the kulaks was a bloody, brutal process in which Russia's more prosperous small farmers were shot by the thousands and deported to Siberia by the hundreds of thousands for opposing Dictator Joseph Stalin's will to force every last Russian peasant into a collective farm (TIME. Nov. 26. 1928 et seq.). Today a fresh battle has opened over Stakhanovism and thus far enraged workers have done most of the shooting. In coal mines, factories, railways and even on the Dictator's favorite collective farms in recent weeks desperate Russian workers have slain Stakhanovites. Pride & Sabotage. Six months ago the most violent of Dictator Stalin's henchmen, big-nosed, hot-eyed Commissar for Heavy Industry Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze. demanded that Russian workmen pitch in and really learn to use the machine tools their Government was buying from the Capitalistic world at drastic sacrifices of food and other Russian goods.
Shouting and banging imperiously for action, Comrade Ordzhonikidze stung Russians in their most sensitive spot—their pride—by telling them how the Capitalists who had sold tools to Bolsheviks were snickering up their sleeves, sure that clumsy Russians would never get the hang of mechanized technique. Already in Russia the breakdown of a machine was often the signal to shoot the operator "for sabotage." Commissar Ordzhonikidze demanded something more constructive.
He got it. One Alexei Stakhanov, a skilled pneumatic drill operator in the Donbas Coal Trust sector, was discovered by the Soviet Press this year to be performing prodigies, soon was raised by Bolshevik puffs to the status of a "Hero of Labor." Russians read that Stakhanov increased his output of coal five-fold by "Stakhanovism." What he did was 'to organize a gang of three miners with such teamwork that Stakhanov, the skilled pneumatic driller, was able to spend all his time drilling out coal, while the others did the propping and panting. By this means the three got out enough coal in a six-hour shift to raise their perman output about five-fold of what it had been when it was a case of no teamwork and every coalminer for himself.
Bullets for Speed. Commissar Ordzhonikidze saw to it that Comrade Stakhanov received a motor car and other luxuries unheard of for a Russian miner. After diligent search in other Soviet mines and factories, fresh Heroes of Labor were produced whose feats of "Stakhanovism" as played up by the Soviet Press became more & more stupendous.