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The tool is a coal mining drill. My interpretation popup on the website suggests that Khrushchev was portraying himself “as a workman, a man of the people”. He is drilling into the cold war iceman in the same way a coal miner would drill into the coal face. What I had not realised is that the drill he is using is identical to that used by Alexei Stakhanov when the latter set an amazing coal mining record in the 1930s. You can see the similarity in this photo of Stakhanov:
I mention Stakhanov in my notes on Stalin’s Russia, and you can swot up further about him, if you wish, here. The point is that Stakhanov was a hero of the Russian Revolution, other hero-workers were awarded the honour of being called a ‘stakhanovite’, and every Russian would have immediately recognised the allusion to Stakhanov’s superhuman feat in the way Khrushchev’s mining drill was drawn in the cartoon. What I could have written, instead of suggesting that Khrushchev was portraying himself simply “as a workman, a man of the people” could have been that Khrushchev was portraying himself as attacking the Cold War: “like a Stakhanovite, a hero of the Russian people”. |
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