Vladimir Putin is certainly not the first Russian to nab the cover of Time Magazine. In addition to Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Sakharov, Brezhnev and many others, if we go all the way back to Dec. 16, 1935, the cover was graced by the legendary Alexei Stakhanov – the iconic Soviet worker of the Stalin era. Stakhanov, as I’m sure many of you are aware, was a miner who became an international celebrity after extracting 14 times his quota of coal single handedly in under six hours, and later set a new record by mining 227 tons of coal in a single shift. His extraordinary feats inspired the Shakhanovite movement which sought to improve productivity and bolster national pride and unity – a name synonymous with Joseph Stalin’s ambitious five-year plans. (Although a largely irrelevant detail now, in 1985 the New York Times reporter Serge Schmemann, now an editor at the International Herald Tribune, first broke the story that Stakhanov’s achievement was a propaganda ploy, as he was helped by numerous other workers to break the record.) If we were to look for the Stakhanov reincarnation in today’s Russia, symbolizing in larger than life terms Russia’s resurgence, strength, confidence, and national unity, we would look no further than Gazprom – an impossibly overachieving corporate behemoth that is not only the central instrument for the Kremlin to leverage its power abroad, but also a Titan-like national symbol of the new reality of Putinist Russia. But like the superhuman Ukrainian miner, are Gazprom’s achievements over-emphasized to serve this purpose?