Was Rural Stakhanovism a Movement

DESPITE A RICH SOVIET LITERATURE on rural shock work and stakhanovism, specialists in the West have either ignored these topics, given them cursory treatment or devoted attention to stakhanovism in heavy industry, where the movement began. The object here is to fill part of the gap and to focus on the question of whether a mass movement can be said to have existed at all. This probing is prompted by contradictory claims found both in the press and in archives.' On the one hand, the press and party leaders praised rural stakhanovism for 'growing' and 'spreading' and for mobilising 'thousands and thousands' of peasants. As early as October 1935, Krest'yanskaya gazeta reported that 'the stakhanovite movement is widely developed in the country'.2 Commenting a year later on stakhanovite numbers, the same paper declared: 'There are many of them, thousands and thousands'.3 Simultaneously, some sources regretted that a mass movement, in fact, had not developed and that stakhanovite numbers were either falling or inflated. Sovkhoznaya gazeta soberly observed in March 1937 that 'the stakhanovite movement has not yet become a mass movement.'4 Documents held in the Central Committee Department of Agriculture of March 1939 also delivered contradictory messages of 'hundreds and thousands of stakhanovites' who were successful, alongside criticisms of farms with low productivity where 'the stakhanovite movement develops slowly and inadequately'.5 Another charge was that drunkenness in the countryside meant that a stakanovskoe dvizhenie existed rather than a stakhanovskoe dvizhenie. The picture conjured up here was one of paralytic peasants, lacking in discipline and loath to take to the fields. Before elaborating upon these competing interpretations, it is appropriate to place rural stakhanovism in historical context

Aesthetics · Art · Movement (music · Object (grammar · Political science · Sociology · History · Law · Soviet and Russian History

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