New York: Penguin, 2019
418 pp., $30 (hardcover)
This is a book about Stakhanovites. That’s a word that originated during the bleakest days of Soviet totalitarianism, when a Russian miner named Alexey Stakhanov set a record by digging more coal during one shift than had ever been mined before. Stalin’s deputies made him into an artificial folk hero by for…
