The Stakhanovite movement took its name from the Soviet coal miner Alexei Stakhanov (1906 to 1977), who produced a prodigious amount of coal in a single shift in August 1935. Championed as an example to be followed as the USSR sought to increase labour productivity, the Stakhanovite movement became a state propaganda exercise, but one which had little effect on materially increasing worker output in the longer term.

Alexei Stakhanov was a coal miner in the Donbas region of Ukraine. He rose to national fame for one prodigious six-hour shift he completed on the night of 30 August 1935. Stakhanov had excavated 102 tons of coal, a figure 14 times greater than the 7.3 tons average for such a shift. Although he was in his physical prime at 30 years of age, Stakhanov had greatly benefitted from the introduction of a new working process, where he, the coal-cutter using his pneumatic drill, need not worry about anything else except working the coal face. Alongside Stakhanov, a team of other workers cleared debris, set up new roof props, and performed any other tasks required, such as making sure his drill always had sufficient compressed air to function. This system worked so well that other workers exceeded Stakhanov's total in September. It was Stakhanov, though, who became the poster boy for Soviet efficiency.

In the context of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's five-year plans, which aimed to revolutionise Soviet industry using targets of production, Stakhanov's great shift was a perfect propaganda opportunity. The first print coverage of the story came in Pravda, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party. However, it was the work of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the People's Commissar of Heavy Industry, that really made the story spread. Ordzhonikidze believed: "In our country, under socialism, heroes of labour must become the most famous" (McGill, 87 to 8). With the direct approval of Stalin, and through the use of posters, film clips, and literature, Stakhanov became a household name across the USSR and a byword for heroic feats in the workplace. Stakhanov even gained international fame, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in December 1935.

Creating heroes was a feature of Stalinism through the 1930s, since it was an opportunity to provide the people with examples of how well the Soviet management of the state was doing (even if it was not). Other examples of state-sponsored hero-worship included the polar explorer Otto Schmidt, who travelled by icebreaker into new regions of the Arctic, and Valery Chkalov, the test pilot who set several long-distance flying records. Stakhanov had his counterpart in the agricultural sector, Maria Demchenko, a collective farmer who was celebrated for the size of her beet yields. The Order of Lenin, then the state's highest civilian honour and created in 1930 to reward "special merits in socialist construction," was awarded to Stakhanov, and he was invited to meet Stalin in the Kremlin in Moscow.

The Stakhanovite movement – a term first used in Pravda in September 1935 – was created to promote higher productivity in industry (the USSR was significantly behind other rival states in this area) and to both intensify and make more efficient standard work processes. Stakhanov was held up as an example to emulate. A medal was created in his name, which was awarded to workers who exceeded their quotas. Working super-intensely for a given period in order to exceed one's normal quota was even given its own special name: storming.

'Stakhanovites,' as such workers who exceeded work quotas were known, were invited to official state celebrations and gatherings. Stalin himself appeared at such events. At one gathering of 30,000 Stakhanovites at the Kremlin, Stalin declared the movement nothing less than a "revolution" in Soviet industry which had spontaneously inspired workers even sometimes "against the will of management" (Tucker, 322) – a dig at higher-level, white-collar employees who would later become a specific target group for Stalin's infamous purges. Stalin's praise for blue-collar workers, on the other hand, was high indeed, stating that "we leaders of the party and government must not only teach the workers but also learn from them" (ibid).

The Stakhanovite movement came to symbolise many things, as here summarised by the historian G. L. Freeze:

Stakhanovism was a complex phenomenon, both something more and something less than what the higher political authorities intended. Idiomatically, it encompassed such a broad range of themes – mastery of technology, the creation of the New Soviet Man, the cultured working-class family, role reversal (the Stakhanovite was the expert; the expert became student of the Stakhanovite), upward social mobility – that internal contradictions were bound to occur.
(363)

Ordinary workers were, as the state intended, inspired to work harder by the Stakhanovite movement. Those who achieved greater results did often receive a pay bonus and gain access to certain consumer goods. Other benefits for outstanding workers could include assistance with the rent of their house, an upgrade to better housing, or expensive one-off gifts like a motorcycle. The movement's focus on working conditions also had some benefit for the ordinary workforce. However, most workers never could repeat the feats of the Stakhanovite medal-earners. Working shifts tended to get longer to ensure targets were met, and there were new initiatives such as the labour books for each worker, which kept an official record of performance. Even worse, the state's obsession with targets only resulted in the objectives steadily increasing so that they became more and more unrealistic. Such overly ambitious targets only led to shoddy products, widespread corruption, and the frequent fabrication of results by management.

In the end, the Stakhanovite movement did not significantly increase labour production (Suny, 453). Very often the Stakhanovites who achieved great feats had only done so because they had received special treatment, priority assistance, the very best and latest equipment, and a change in working processes favourable to their specific endeavours. Factory managers and mine managers sought the prestige of having a worker under them achieve famous feats. There could arise, though, the embarrassing situation for those managers who did have a Stakhanovite or two in their workforce that the authorities began to question why such good levels of productivity had not been achieved before.

The hidden cost of the obsession with individual worker targets was that most other workers and teams decreased in productivity because of the disruption to the usual working practices that now favoured particular Stakhanovites. Very often the target for the factory or mine as a whole was not reached because of the disruption of favouring a few manic workers. Preemptive maintenance and repair works in factories were areas neglected, since these could slow down production. There was, too, an increase in tension in the workforce between those workers set up to achieve impressive targets and those who were not. Intimidation of and assaults upon Stakhanovites were not uncommon. The prizes awarded to Stakhanovites also created jealousy in a society where consumer goods and better housing were not at all easy to come by.

In 1936, Communist Party leaders began to cover the failings of the Stakhanovite movement by declaring, as had been done to cover the tremendous hardships caused by Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture, that a secret enemy was sabotaging the movement, an enemy usually identified as anti-Communists amongst the better-qualified workers and management. These failings of the state would only lead to yet more oppression, this time with Stalin's Great Purge of 1936 to 8.

Alexei Stakhanov continued to work in the coal industry, eventually rising to management level. He died in 1977, and the town where he had begun his working life, Kadiivka, was renamed Stakhanov in his honour (although the old name was reinstated in 2016).