Chernaia Rabota i Chernyi Khleb: Bread as Material and Metaphor in Konstantin Izmailov’s Diary

• In Event: Hearing Voices: An Accountant, Blokadniki, and Uzbek Kolkhozniki

Abstract

This presentation will focus on the discussion of bread throughout the 1930s in the diary of Konstantin Izmailov, a carpenter turned accountant in Smolenskoye village. As both an existential necessity of everyday survival (that was in critically short supply throughout the 1930s) and a tool used ideologically to ‘prove’ the long term success of the revolution, bread is an interesting nexus point–a place from which to probe how Soviet citizens negotiate the between material circumstance and ideological narrative to make sense of their lives. Izmailov was educated during the 1920s in the literacy campaign, but expelled from the party at the end of the 1920s. I argue that his daily observations of bread—its presence, absence, quality, and associated discourse—became the basis for his evolving critique and adaptation of Soviet ideological narratives. Using sources on overarching state narrative at the time, including newspapers and radio broadcasts that he makes direct reference to in his diary, I argue that Izmailov incorporates ideological narrative into his own, especially those around class traitors on the kolkhoz, but adapts this to fit the reality he sees– such that the class traitors are in his case the engineers and workers that receive extra rations. During the second half of the decade, Izmailov makes ironic use of the discourse of abundance and a better life that Stalin propagated. Everyday material observations of a lack of bread become a long term historical analysis within the process of his diary, appropriating ideology as a framework of thought rather than signs of devotion to the Soviet image of the now.

Author

• Margaret Borozan, Stanford U