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deeds of labour and entered the history of the factory as real heroes. People of legends.'
    The heroes created by Bibikov and the propaganda department of Temp were men like Dmitry Melnikov, who assembled an American 'Marion' fourteen-ton excavator in six days, not two weeks as the manufacturer's guide said. These and other prodigious deeds were publicized on stengazety, hand-stencilled wall newspapers posted around the works. Those who slacked, conversely, were denounced by their colleagues: 'I, concrete pourer of the Kuzmenko group, stood idle for three hours because of the incompetence of X,' read one public notice displayed on a stengazeta in late 1930. 'I demand that the hero-workers of our group are paid for these lost hours out of his pocket.'
    But despite this cajoling, work had fallen behind as the thirteenth anniversary of the Revolution approached in October 1930 and the deadline for the factory's completion loomed. At the instigation of Bibikov's Party Committee, foremen organized 'storm nights' of labour, accompanied by a brass band, teams of workers racing each other.
    The factory's workers and management quickly became obsessed with these competitions, in line with a national newspaper campaign which reported these miraculous (and increasingly bizarre) feats exhaustively. One of the leitmotifs of the endless Pravda coverage became wowing foreigners and confounding their forecasts. Not to be outdone, the KhTZ soon produced its own records:
    'The [workers] also refuted the calculations of foreign experts of the productivity of the "Kaiser" cement mixer,' the KhTZ's history proudly records. 'Professor Zailiger, for instance, claimed that the machine could not produce more than 240 portions of concrete in one eight-hour shift. But the Communists of the Tractor Factory decided to exceed the norm.' Four hundred men come on the shift, heroically producing 250 mixtures. 'Foreign specialists and their theories are not a law to us,' foreman G.B. Marsunin boasted to the Temp correspondent.
    The factory brass bands now played all night, every night, echoing in the machine hall and drowning the noise of the KhTZ's six Kaiser concrete mixers. The foremen rushed back and forth, inciting their men to work. Over the next few months new records were set at 360 mixtures, then at 452. An all-Union rally of concrete pourers met in Kharkov to celebrate the KhTZ's amazing records. The foreign concrete mixture specialist, the mysterious Professor Zailiger himself, came from Austria and watched in amazement - 'Yes, you work, it's a fact,' Temp records him as saying.
    There were prodigies of bricklaying, too. Arkady Mikunis, a young enthusiast from the Komsomol, would stay behind after work to watch old hands lay bricks and read specialist bricklaying journals in his spare time; he quickly matched his teachers with their norm of 800 bricks per shift. On a specially organized 'storm night' Mikunis laid 4,700 bricks in a single shift; 'More,' Temp records proudly, 'than even America.' On a factory sponsored holiday in Kiev, he was invited to show the local bricklayers his skills and laid 6,800. Word spread through the bricklaying world and a German champion came from Hamburg to see for himself - after half a shift against Mikunis he gave up the competition. And still Mikunis didn't stop. His record rose to 11,780 bricks in one day, a somewhat improbable three times the previous world record. For his prodigious skills at speed bricklaying - apparently at the rate of a brick every four seconds for twelve straight hours Mikunis was awarded the Order of Lenin.
    As if setting new records wasn't enough, Bibikov also instigated evening classes to 'raise the level of socialist consciousness' of the factory's workforce. By the spring of 1931 most of the workers, who a year before had been starving peasants digging clay, were taking voluntary evening classes to qualify as machinists and engineers. After the end of the shifts there was a crush to get