Statement by a Soviet Worker named Kravchenko.

In September, 1935, a "miracle" occurred in the Donetz Basin. A worker named Stakhanov mined 102 tons of coal in one shift--fourteen times the normal output. To a practical engineer the deceit [ was ] transparent. Special conditions and special tools and assistance had been provided. It was a miracle made to order for the Kremlin in launching a new religion--the religion of speed-up.
What Stakhanov had done, all miners could do! What miners could do, all other industries could do! Doubters were damned. Technicians who raised practical objections were defeatists. Workers who could not toe the mark were slackers!
Moscow screamed the new Stakhanovite slogans. Telegraphic orders began to pour into Nikopol from Kharkov and Moscow headquarters. We must instantly create Stakhanovite brigades, as pace-setters for the slowpokes.
Our plants had been operating less than six months. They worked on three shifts under many handicaps. Neither the amount nor the quality of the steel and other raw stuffs was adequate. The workers were mostly green, the staff mostly inexperienced. Because of undernourishment and bad living conditions, the physical vitality of the personnel was low. What we needed most was smoother integration of the productive process. This seemed the worst possible moment for overloading either the men or the machines. Rhythmic teamwork, rather than spurts of record-breaking, was the key to steady output. More than fifteen hundred workers engaged on a common task, in which every operation meshed into the next, couldn't speed up arbitrarily without throwing the whole effort into chaotic imbalance. But orders were orders.
In my own sub-plant, I was obliged to resort to artificial speed-up, a crime against the machines and the workers alike. I regrouped my labour, putting the best workers, foremen and engineers into one shift. Then we selected the best tools and materials for the special shift. Having thus stacked the cards, we gave the signal for the specious game to start.
One evening, with reporters and photographers present, the "Stakhanovite" shift got under way. As expected, it "over fulfilled" the normal quota by 8 per cent. There were flaming headlines. Congratulations arrived from officials in the capitals.
But this "victory" on the industrial front left me heartsick. The other two shifts, deprived of their best personnel and their best tools, lost more than the favoured group had won. By contrast they seemed ineffective if not "lazy." They naturally resented being made the scapegoats. They cursed the lucky ones and the officials.
Throughout the Soviet land the speed-up drive turned into a furious campaign. Thousands of administrators were dismissed, many were arrested, for sabotage of the new "socialist production" and for "failure to provide the proper Stakhanovite conditions." Every lag in output was blamed upon the engineers and technicians. The picture created in the public mind was that of workers eager to step up production but "held back" by scheming managers.
A wedge was thus driven between workers and technical staffs.
Even to the simplest-minded factory hand or miner it was apparent that the new records set by forced speed-up would soon be set up as "norms" for everybody.
When the drive was at its height, in November, a national convention of leading Stakhanovites was called in Moscow. It was addressed by Stalin [who contrasted] their zeal with the backwardness of other workers. From that time forward, the Stakhanovites became an elite  of labour, earning a lot more than their fellows and enjoying all sorts of privileges.
And thus the Kremlin drove a wedge also between various categories of workers. The ancient technique of dividing to rule was being applied to a whole nation under the banner of "building socialism."
It was not long before the worst misgivings of the workers came true. Peremptory orders arrived to revise the "norms" of production, on which wages were based, upward by 10 to 20 per cent. It was a roundabout order to exact 10 to 20 per cent more work for the same wage. In my plant, of fifteen hundred men, perhaps two hundred qualified as speed-kings. For the others the revision of norm meant simply a serious cut in earning power. The general resentment was unmistakable.