AQA 7042 · 2N · R14.3⁄3 - Stakhanovism, results and the success of the Five Year Plans
Examine how the Stakhanovite movement tried to turn exceptional workers into a route to higher productivity, and how far the first three Five Year Plans can be called successful. Separate publicity from representative evidence and judge the Plans by clear criteria. The same record can show major growth in industrial capacity alongside weak efficiency and severe human costs.
From one record to a national movement
On 31 August 1935, during the Second Five Year Plan, the miner Aleksei Stakhanov was reported to have cut 102 tons of coal in a six-hour shift at the Central Irmino mine in the Donets Basin—about fourteen times his quota. Within days, Pravda celebrated the feat as a world record. The Party then made Stakhanov the model for a nationwide campaign of socialist competition, in which workers were urged to exceed production norms and demonstrate mastery of modern machinery.
Stakhanovite
A worker publicly recognised for exceptional output or technical mastery in the state-sponsored productivity movement that began in 1935.
The record was not simply the product of one unusually strong miner. Two timbermen carried out supporting work while Stakhanov kept cutting coal. This division of labour showed that reorganising a team could reduce interruptions and use machinery more intensively. It also means that all 102 tons cannot sensibly be treated as one man's normal, unaided output or multiplied across every shift.
The distinction is important: an exceptional demonstration may reveal a better method, but it does not prove that the method can be reproduced with ordinary staffing, supplies and equipment across the whole economy.
Productivity promise and workplace pressure
The campaign offered both material and political incentives. Progressive piece rates meant that output above the norm could bring much higher earnings, while selected Stakhanovites received honours, scarce goods and prominent coverage. The movement therefore encouraged some workers to learn equipment, reorganise tasks and suggest changes to production. It was not only a story invented after the event: workers could exercise agency through technical skill and criticism of inefficient management.
Yet the movement's promise contained a pressure mechanism. Once record-breakers were presented as evidence that existing norms were obsolete, norms for other workers could be raised. Ordinary workers did not necessarily receive the same preparation, assistance or favourable conditions as the celebrated record-setters. Higher expectations could therefore intensify work without reproducing the method that had made the original record possible.
Managers and technical staff faced conflicting demands. They were expected to sponsor records, but concentrating supplies and assistance on a record shift could disrupt the rest of a factory or mine and create bottlenecks. Resistance could then be labelled obstruction or sabotage. Some workers resented the privileges given to Stakhanovites and the higher norms that followed; verbal and physical attacks were recorded.
Stakhanovism should therefore be judged as a mixture of innovation, incentive and coercive pressure. It sometimes revealed better organisation, but spectacular records were poor evidence of average productivity when they depended on exceptional inputs and caused disruption elsewhere.
How to measure success
Calling the Five Year Plans “successful” requires a criterion. Four criteria lead to different, defensible judgements:
- Industrial capacity: did the USSR acquire substantially more ability to produce industrial and military goods?
- Efficiency and productivity: did output per worker or per unit of capital rise, rather than total output growing mainly because more labour, machinery and resources were mobilised?
- Human welfare: did the transformation improve consumption and security without costs so severe that they outweigh the productive gain?
- Strategic durability: had the industrial base become large and adaptable enough to support the state under the pressure of war?
The data must also be handled carefully. A Western reconstruction cited by economic historian R. W. Davies estimates that industrial output roughly trebled between 1928 and 1940, an average rise of nearly 10 per cent a year. That is powerful evidence of capacity growth, but it is not proof that every official target was met, that the goods were of the intended quality, or that productivity rose at the same rate.
Soviet output indices could be distorted when new products replaced old ones at prices that made apparent growth exceed real growth. Different index weights also produce different totals. Mark Harrison's research nevertheless warns against the opposite mistake: not every Soviet series was exaggerated, and the lowest estimate is not automatically the most reliable. A sound judgement triangulates physical output, reconstructed indices, labour productivity, consumption and human outcomes.
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