Not by Bread Alone
 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 virtue of the machine, 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 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 he is told by the judges 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. A year and a half later, Lopatkin's case is reviewed, and he is released and returns. He finds that Nadia has been able to obtain his papers, that the designers who built the demonstration model have been able to replicate it, and that his machine is in operation in a factory in the Urals. An investigation is ordered into the officials who blocked Lopatkin, but they get off lightly and are later promoted. Lopatkin is now a respected inventor, earning a fine living. The officials, who form an invisible web that frustrate the individualists, suggest that he should buy a car, a television, or a dacha, and by implication become like them, but Lopatkin says, no, he will continue to fight them: "Man lives not by bread alone, if he is honest." Lopatkin realizes he will spend his life fighting the bureaucrats.