Alexey Stakhanov
The validity of Stakhanov's record has since been called into question. In 1985, The New York Times printed a story that said Stakhanov had indeed succeeded in his feat, but that it was only because the Communist Party had pre-arranged the event. With it, the Communist party wanted to boost public morale. According to this article, many other miners helped Stakhanov beat the mining record. The Times quoted the chief of the Tsentralnaya-Irmino mine's branch of the Party, Konstantin G. Petrov: "I suppose Stakhanov need not have been the first... It could have been anybody else. In the final analysis it was not the individual face-worker who determined whether the attempt to break the record would succeed, but the new system of coal extraction." In 1988, Soviet newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda claimed that the widely propagandized personal achievements of Stakhanov were puffery – the paper insisted that Stakhanov had used a number of helpers on support works, while the throughput was tallied for him alone. Still, according to the newspaper, Stakhanov's approach had eventually led to the increased productivity by means of a better organization of the work, including specialization and task sequencing.