Progressive publications around the world from Pravda and The Nation to The Guardian hailed this Hero of Socialist Labor for adding 377 tons of CO2 to climate forcing in a single day. His homeland's General Secretary was duly impressed, and praised him as the greatest science communicator of the day:
"People talk about science. They say that the data of science, the data contained in technical handbooks and instructions… But what kind of science are they talking about? The data of science have always been tested by practice, by experience.
Science which has severed contact with practice, with experience - what sort of science is that? If science were the thing it is represented to be by certain of our conservative comrades, it would have perished for humanity long ago.
Science is called science just because… it does not fear to raise its hand against the obsolete and antiquated, and because it lends an attentive ear to the voice of experience, of practice. If it were otherwise, we would have no science at all; we'd have no astronomy,… we'd have no biology… we'd have no chemistry, and would still be listening to alchemists.
That is why I think that our engineers, technical workers, and business managers… would do well if they ceased to cling to the old technical standards and readjusted their work in a real scientific manner to the new way, the Stakhanov way.
— J. V. Stalin
Speech at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites
17 November 1935
