Nikolai Iakovlevich Mamai

Born Feb. 7, 1926, in the stanitsa (large cossack village) of Anastas’evskaia, Krasnodar Krai. Soviet mine worker and innovator, brigade leader of a cutter-loader machine brigade of miners, Hero of Socialist Labor (1957). Became a member of the CPSU in 1955.

While working at the Severnaia Mine in the Donbas in 1956, Mamai was the initiator of a competition that called for each worker to exceed the daily shift output norms by at least 1 ton. In 1961, while employed at the Sukhodol’skaia Mine No. 1, he initiated the movement for comprehensive mechanization of production in the coal industry and overfulfillment of plans through the introduction of new machinery. He was a delegate to the Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU (1961), at which he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. He was a deputy to the fifth through seventh convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and in 1964 received the Lenin Prize.