75677 - Old new man

Ν. Lygeros

In the propaganda of the Soviet Union the idea of the  new man was crucial.
In this system, everything had to be new.
The new soviet man was an ideal.
The Soviets used the poor Alexey Stakhanov
as an exemplar of the new man.
And they created the Stakhanovite movements.
The starting point was the little man.
And they needed a hero of labor.
It was essential for their economy
to prove that  their ideology was correct.
They used the notion of heroization.
Their hero had to be nothing at the beginning
but after his recognition from the system
everybody in the world knows his acts.
The women were called mother-heroines
and received medals for ten or  more children.
It was like a mass production of new men.
But after decades of the same propaganda
the new men were older.
And at the end, with the fall of Soviet Union
we saw only old men with the same spirit.
It was the end of the old new man.