Aleksei Grogorievich Stakhanov - Hero of Socialist Labor

In August, 1935 Soviet newspapers reported that a twenty-nine year old miner, Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov (Алексе́й Григо́рьевич Стаха́нов) in the Donbass region mined 102 tonnes of coal in five hours, forty-five minutes. The output was fourteen times his quota. Less than a month later, he mined 227 tons in a single shift.

These heroic accomplishments were held up as a model for others to follow. Workers who exceeded their quotas were known as "Stakhanovites." The movement inspired others to follow suit. The government's goal was to exhort individuals to ever greater efforts at productivity.

Several curious things about the Stakhanovite movement.
1. The Soviet Union had just completed a bloody collectivization campaign, collectivizing every industrial and agricultural activity, yet Stakhanov's accomplishment was to exceed a personal, piece-work goal;
2. Central planners also established output goals for enterprises, but managers apparently saw no way to achieve those goals except to prod individual workers;
3. Central planners were heavily engaged at the time in mechanization of production, but management methods followed pre-revolutionary hierarchical and authoritarian models of management;
4. Management focus was on gross output, not quality;
5. Exhortation was a major instrument of motivation - this instrument almost never works well;
6. Seeds of later failure of the Soviet economic model were sown in the late twenties and early thirties.

My main conclusion: Soviet economic shortcomings resulted from poor management methods - methods handed down from at least the time of Peter the Great.

The failure of the Soviet Union as a political system, however, stemmed from the difficulty of incorporating more than 120 nationalities, with as many languages and at least that many cultures.

It was a pretty impossible task. The breakup of the Soviet Union has not completely played out to this day.

Though the experiment failed, it accomplished some amazing things.