Not by Bread Alone

Not by Bread Alone (Russian: "Не хлебом единым") is a 1956 novel by the Soviet author Vladimir Dudintsev. The novel, published in installments in the journal Novy Mir, was a sensation in the USSR. The tale of an engineer who is opposed by bureaucrats in seeking to implement his invention came to be a literary symbol of the Khrushchev Thaw.

"Bread" formed part of one of the most important political slogans of the Bolshevik Revolution: "Bread, Land, Peace and All Power to the Soviets."

However, "Not by bread alone" is a quote which appears once in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and twice in the Christian Scriptures (New Testament) and reads in the King James Version as follows:

The title may also refer in part to To Make My Bread by American writer Grace Lumpkin; the book won the Maxim Gorky Prize for Literature in 1932.

Late in the Joseph Stalin era, a teacher of physics, Dimitri Lopatkin, invents a machine which revolutionizes the centrifugal casting of pipes, then a difficult and time-consuming operation. Lopatkin, a loyal communist, believes his invention will help the Soviet economy if it is used. Despite the machine's merits, it is rejected by bureaucrats. When Lopatkin gets a chance to have a demonstration model built at a Moscow institute, his opponents favor a rival machine and then cancel Lopatkin's. Lopatkin is offered a chance to work on his machine for the military, which he accepts, but he is soon arrested and accused of passing secrets to his lover, Nadia Drozdov, the estranged wife of one of the officials who opposes him.

At trial, Lopatkin asks what secrets he is accused of betraying, and the judges respond that he is not allowed to know that; the identity of the secrets is itself secret. One of the judges, a young major named Badyin, sees the absurdity of the proceedings and defends Lopatkin. Nonetheless, the inventor is convicted and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, with Badyin announcing he will write a dissenting opinion. While Lopatkin gains permission to have his papers turned over to Nadia, the papers are believed to be destroyed.

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