Friday, August 3, 2007   Stakhanov was a coal miner in the old
Stalinist Soviet Union who in 1935 was reported to have mined an
incredible amount of coal in his shift - 102 tons which was 14x
the norm. An entire propaganda campaign was based on this claim
and workers were exhorted to become, and were rewarded as being
"Stakhanovites". Norms were raised and workers were pushed
harder for the good of socialism. The Stakhanovite movement and
propaganda was used in the old Soviet Union for decades.
Solzhenitsyn exposed it as a fraud in his books about the camps
and life in the Soviet Union. In 1988 the Soviet press unmasked
the Stakhanov "achievements" as a lie: the mine simply tallied
the work of an entire team under one man.  The Stakhanovite
movement is a good historical example of a mass delusion
promoted by the "big lie" of a totalitarian revolutionary
movement. Stalin simply wanted his minions to produce more so
used this propaganda to drive them harder.  In 1974, Heddrick
Smith, the noted Moscow Bureau Ch