"Stuck-Up Stakhanovites"

Until an illiterate Russian coal miner named Alexei Stakhanov developed the "speedup" technique which made him dear to Five-Year Plan officials and brought orders from Joseph Stalin that workers throughout Russia must increase their output (TIME, Dec. 16), the most favored Soviet class was the Young Communists for whom nothing in Russia was supposed to be too good.

By last week Stalin's pampering of Stakhanovites, who are not necessarily Communists, had roused the Young Communists to scoffing gibes at "stuck-up Stakhanovites" and disclosures of the pampering they enjoy. According to the Young Communists, one 17-year-old Stakhanovite mechanic in a Moscow carburetor plant has been swept into such a whirl of balls, banquets, meetings in his honor and general "bourgeois publicity" topped off by floods of flattering poetry that this carbureting Stakhanovite did only 16 days work in December, nine in January and seven in February.

As for famed & fantastic Dusia Vinogradova, that highly temperamental young Juno of the Soviet Textile Trust who makes amazing platform boasts of the scores & scores of Soviet looms she is able to tend simultaneously, the Young Communists sneered that Soviet cinema directors are following Stakhanovite Vinogradova around, beseeching her to realize that, with her obvious talents as a highly emotional actress, she is wasting herself in Stakhanovism and should go on the Soviet screen.

Officially in Moscow this week Young Communist headquarters summed up against pampered Stuck-Up Stakhanovites: "It is high time to deal drastically with the vulgar and servile people who corrupt and spoil our glorious noble youth!"

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