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Queerest effect of Stakhanovism has been to make Russia's famed Five-Year Plans look slow. The Moscow News is now caricaturing even Russia's previously sacrosanct planners, draws half-smiling, half-snarling workers in the act of striding through and kicking aside the Bolshevik plan bureaucrats.
Stakhanovite Celebrations. Workers of the World may not agree that the speed-up of Alexei Stakhanov is a good thing for the proletariat, but they unite in applauding the medals and the motor car Dictator Stalin has given Stakhanov, the silk lingerie and perfume he bought in Moscow for his wife. Individual Stakhanovites all receive fabulously high pay —the question suspiciously asked by Soviet workers being how long such exaggerated wages will be paid after any great number of workers have been induced to speed up. Afraid that "Stakhanovism" is in fact a continent-wide swindle of the proletariat by their Soviet bosses, spunky Russian workers, like spunky Russian kulaks before them, have started shooting.
The kulaks lost their battle, were wiped out. At the height of Stakhanovite celebrations in Moscow, Dictator Stalin said grimly that in the Soviet transport sector, anti-Stakhanovites have had their teeth knocked, in and been booted from their jobs. He clearly indicated that he means to enforce speedups throughout Russia by the same methods of OGPU terror which have forced 85% of all Russian peasants who were not wiped out to join collective farms.
Here & there some bright Alexei Stakhanov may have a bright idea but in most Russian factories last week correspondents found that Stakhanovism means primarily overexertion. In a big textile mill just outside Moscow the manager, ordered to Stakhanovize, told "girls with strong legs" tending two looms that if they thought they could stand the strain of tending four he would gladly increase their pay so long as they could keep it up. With sweat standing out from every pore one such Heroine of Labor paused long enough to pant at correspondents: "I asked for it! It's hard work, but I wanted to make more. You are on the run all the time, but after a few bumps you learn the shortest way from one loom to another, and how to save steps. I feel all right, tired, but nothing serious. I guess it would be easier, though, if we got more nourishing food. What we get is pretty poor." "I Spend My Money." Loaded with lingerie, perfume, champagne, vodka, cheese and sausages Hero of Labor Alexei Stakhanov was back from Moscow last week in his home on the Donbas Steppe, a four-room shack, the walls of which were decorated with poster pictures not of potent Dictator Stalin but of popular War Commissar "Klim" Voroshilov. Squeaked the Stakhanov family phonograph in English: "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, Big Bad Wolf, Big Bad Wolf!"
To the galaxy of correspondents and photographers gruff, iron-jawed Communist Party Agent Konstantin Giorgevich Petrov was introduced as "the man who discovered Stakhanov." Asked reporters of Stakhanov: "Do you get many letters? Do people write to you asking about your method of work?"