Eating sh*t in Russia

This article explores Russian literary satires that discuss food insecurity in the Soviet Union by underlining the fundamental contradiction between the government’s promise of abundance and the reality of hunger and even famine. These texts reproach the Soviet regime’s authoritarianism and messianism, as this is regarded as the root of the economic disasters experienced in the USSR. Hyperbolically, some of these novels use the motif of faeces as food to address this failure. Alluding to theoreticians Mikhail Bakhtin and Paul Simpson, this article dissects the use of grotesque and carnivalesque motifs and the use of irony and hyperbole as satirical means chosen by these novelists to discuss the issues of hunger and authoritarian oppression. The focus of this study lies on Vladimir Voinovich’s novel Moscow 2042 (1987), a negative utopia in which a fictional communist state ironically “advances” to the point at which it recycles faecal matter to create pseudo-nourishment. However, the novel shows that the Christian dictatorship that follows communism equally ignores the citizenry’s well-being. The analysis also refers to Voinovich’s previous novel Life and Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1975), his later novel Monumental Propaganda (2000) and to Andrey Sinyavsky’s novella Lyubimov (1963) and it uncovers a common denominator in these authors’ subversive take on abuses of power and their economic effect. These satires expose the role of food (in)security as oppressive means in authoritarian systems using humorous and provocative metaphors. Their political criticism remains relevant today, as this article argues.