RAS 12 - JRL 6535

HISTORY: EARLY STALINISM

10. STAKHANOVISM: STALIN'S "GREAT LEAP FORWARD"

SOURCE. R. W. Davies and Oleg Khlevnyuk, "Stakhanovism and the Soviet Economy," Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54 No. 6, September 2002, pp. 867-904.

On September 1, 1935, Pravda reported that a Donbas miner named Stakhanov had extracted 102 tons of coal in a six-hour shift, exceeding the norm more than fivefold. Thus began the Stakhanovite "movement" -- a campaign urging workers to emulate this and other alleged feats of super-productivity. (Stakhanov's name was sometimes linked to that of Krivonos, a train driver who increased the speed of his locomotive from 24 to 32 kilometers an hour.)

Professor Bob Davies (Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, UK -- my own alma mater) and Oleg Khlevnyuk (State Archive of the Russian Federation) have mined newly accessible archives to uncover the political and economic background to this campaign and assess its impact.

Following the upheaval of forced-pace industrialization associated with the first Five Year Plan (1928-33), the Soviet leadership shifted in 1934 and early 1935 to a policy of consolidation, with a more modest level of capital investment and a stress on financial stabilization. However, by the summer of 1935 Stalin faced a quandary. While recognizing the need to keep total investment within tolerable limits, he was loath to cut any specific investments allocated to defense, upgrading rail transportation, building schools, re-equipping light and heavy industry or the Moscow canal.

Thus there took shape the strategy of "substituting intensification for investment" -- that is, squeezing more out of less -- even if that meant pushing the capacity of both machines and workers up to and beyond their limits. When Soviet workers master the new technology, Stalin declared on May 4, 1935, they can and must "bring about miracles." The Stakhanovite movement was a semi-orchestrated response from below to this call from above. It gave the leadership a justification to revise workers' output norms upward at the beginning of 1936. Those who warned of the dangers of ignoring objective limits were prosecuted for sabotage.

The movement did not last very long. "Only 1936 can properly be described as a 'Stakhanovite year'" -- and from July 1936 there was a shift back to more balanced growth. In 1937 Stakhanovism (like much else) was overwhelmed by the purges; in 1938 it was revived but on a low key. It appears that Stalin came to the realization that Stakhanovism was not yielding the hoped-for results and decided quietly to abandon it.

The authors' analysis suggests that Stakhanovism had no overall impact on economic development, for good or ill. It was "merely a quarterly blip in the general advance in productivity that had begun well before the campaign." It did lead to significant improvements in various industrial practices, but at the price of disrupting the planning and supply system, damaging equipment, and sharply increasing the accident rate.

The parallel that came to my mind in reading this article was the "Great Leap Forward" of 1958-61 in China. Like Stalin, Mao Zedong sought a short cut to industrial development by driving people to "miraculous" feats. Of course, Mao's insanity lasted longer and did incomparably more harm. Millions of peasants, forced to neglect their crops and build useless backyard steel furnaces, starved to death. Stalin by comparison was a paragon of reason.