The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  At the cartridge factory Sakharov discovered that even obtaining the bread ration was not always easy. The deliveries were irregular and ‘a worker from the night shift might have to stand in line from eight a.m. till the middle of the afternoon before getting his ration. Since he had to be back at work by eight p.m. he had practically no time to sleep. And you couldn’t leave the line for a moment – try it, and you’d never get your place back in the silent, unyielding queue.’79 While in Germany or Britain food queues were a tiring annoyance, in the Soviet Union they drained the energy and used up precious time which could have been spent sleeping. A second problem was how to ‘cash in’ the rest of the ration cards. ‘Coupons for groats, butter, and sugar were often wasted, having expired by the end of the month, unless they were traded for bread coupons or were spent in the canteen, since most of the time nothing of the kind could be found in the stores.’80 Frequently one food substituted for another. Instead of meat, eggs might be distributed, or a little honey rather than sugar. An inhabitant of Rostov recalled that nothing could ever be relied upon and a mysterious law appeared to govern these substitutions. At times they could be heartbreaking. A worker at a defence plant in Kuibyshev remembered that in the winter of 1941–42 they were given chocolate as a substitute for everything, even meat and bread. Even many years after the end of the war she still could not ‘look at chocolate’.81

  At the beginning of 1942 the fate of the Soviet Union looked bleak. No contemporary observer would have confidently predicted that the Soviets would not only hold out against the Germans but eventually be crucial in bringing about their defeat. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov conceded to the American embassy that ‘non-essential workers were “living on [a] restricted ration, one which provides them with a bare subsistence level of nutrition”’.82 The officials in the food offices, who had to make decisions about the quantity of food which would be distributed to the different types of consumer, were in the unenviable position of deciding who they should abandon to starvation.83 Desperate hunger caused a wave of crime to sweep across the Soviet Union as the hungry raided gardens and food stores.84 Those at the margins of society, the elderly and the infirm, were dying of hunger. One Russian émigré remembered the dokhodiagi (people on the verge of death) who lurked at the edges of a dining room for sick children in Chernikovsk, licking the plates once the children had finished eating.85 US naval intelligence officer Kemp Tolley was haunted by the spectacle of little knots of ‘starved wretches’ who gathered on the docks at Molotovsk near Archangel where shipments of lend-lease food were being unloaded. They would scoop up and wolf down by the fistful ‘raw meat, and scraps or steaming chicken guts thrown out with the [American] ship’s galley garbage’.86 This grisly feast was made at great risk of the guards seizing them. Under one ship’s slop chute lay a body covered by a blanket of snow; he or she had been shot down by the guards while hunting for scraps.87

  Even as late as August 1943 American analysts were worried that ‘the present stringencies in food and manpower’ would ‘by the summer of 1944 … prove a serious impairment to Russia’s military capabilities’.88 Given that the Soviets were doing most of the fighting against the Wehrmacht, holding down 189 German divisions on the eastern front, in contrast to just fourteen against the Allied forces in Italy, this was a source of real concern.89 However, beginning in the spring of 1942, the Soviets managed to restructure and initiate recovery, first in the armaments industries and the military and then in 1943 in the civilian economy. Years of unreasonable quotas and demands from above meant that industrial managers had become adept at concealing spare capacity from their superiors so that their targets would not be raised to impossible heights. During the war they used this slack to increase productivity.90 The imposition of communist rule had suppressed individual ingenuity but in the special circumstances of war the controls over management eased. Once officials realized that taking responsibility would not necessarily have fatal repercussions, they demonstrated great resourcefulness.91 With the transportation system stretched to its limits central distribution no longer worked and as a consequence self-sufficiency flourished. Factories began producing their own raw materials, machine tools and components, some industrial plants set up their own steelworks and trained their workers to repair as well as run the machinery.92 Even in the gulags the factories produ-cing uniforms manufactured their own needles, thread and parts for sewing machines.93

  While managers were afforded greater freedom, controls over the workers tightened. The Soviet war machine maintained the communist principle that an atmosphere of terror would force people to find a way of meeting impossible demands. The factories were treated as part of the front line. From September 1942 leaving employment without permission was regarded as a form of desertion. Holidays were banned, working hours were extended, slackers or absentees risked being sent to a labour camp. On occasion soldiers escorted the workers to the factories.94 A senior Russian engineer who worked in munitions factories throughout the war recalled that the tired and hungry workers were fearful. They lived at the mercy of the director, who could withdraw their status as essential war workers (bronya) at his whim and turn them over to the military committee.95 But as Victor Kravchenko discovered, there were physical limits to what under-fed workers could achieve.

  In May 1942 Kravchenko was made head of the Department of War Engineering Armament for the Sovnarkom.* In effect he was put in charge of armaments factories throughout Russia. ‘In line of duty I visited a great many factories where output was lagging. Invariably I found that food shortage was one of the main reasons.’96 In the winter of 1942–43 he was horrified to see that the workers in the factories were ‘gaunt with hunger’.97 This was having a disastrous impact on productivity. ‘Neither Stalin’s terse commands nor Beria’s “strong measures”’, he commented sourly, ‘could squeeze adequate equipment from factories lacking raw materials and operated by workers on a starvation diet.’98 He noted that where factories were able to provide their employees with one fairly nourishing meal this speeded up the tempo of production. ‘“Give us more food and we’ll give you more goods,” the executives always pleaded. “Our people haven’t the strength to meet your deadlines”.’99 But when Kravchenko presented his superior with a plan to increase production in a particular factory by providing the workers with 500 grams of bread a day, he was told, ‘Look here. Are you a social worker or a Bolshevik? Humanitarianism is a bad guide in making state decisions. Learn from comrade Stalin – love the people but sacrifice their needs when essential!’100

  Yet at the Kremlin Kravchenko found himself ‘among men who could eat ample and dainty food in full view of starving people not only with a clear conscience but with a feeling of righteousness, as if they were performing a duty to history’.101 Kravchenko was surprised to discover that breakfast at the Kremlin consisted of eggs, stewed meat, white bread, and tea with sugar and biscuits. After he had eaten his fill he would still have enough left over to pass on some food to his secretary, his waitress and her two children.102 Stalin certainly did not stint himself during the war. At Kremlin banquets caviar, fish and meat were all washed down with liberal quantities of vodka, wine and cognac.103 It was a bitter reality that during these years of terrible privation the communist elite was cushioned from the suffering, just as they had always been. When the state monopoly on the distribution of goods was introduced in the 1920s a system of closed stores was set up which were only open to the employees of certain factories or offices. In theory they were supposed to protect the working population from shortages but in effect they created elites with privileged access to scarce goods.104 As a member of the Sovnarkom, Kravchenko was entitled to shop at closed stores which stocked ‘bacon, canned goods, butter, sugar, flour, salt pork – all brought in from the United States – as well as Soviet fish, fowl, smoked fish, vegetables, vodka, wine, cigarettes … Not one Russian in a thousand suspected that such abundant shops existed and, indeed, the authorities operated them discr
eetly, as far as possible out of sight of the masses. There was usually a line-up of elegant motorcars outside our “closed” food store, for instance, but few passers-by knew what they were there for. No ordinary Muscovite got a glimpse, let alone a taste, of the lend-lease and home-made luxury piled up in that shop.’105

  Meanwhile, many factory administrators took the initiative and tried to remedy the dire food situation of their workers by applying the principle of self-sufficiency to the rationing system as well as to industrial production. Allotments were dug and in the new industrial area based in the Urals–Volga–Siberia heartland, 7 million gardens sprang up beside the newly reassembled factories. The cabbages and potatoes which they grew were used to supplement the workers’ canteen meals. It has been estimated that factory gardens contributed about 250 calories a day to each worker’s diet.106 Given the low ration, this was not a negligible contribution and by 1944 this source of food was vital to about 25 million people.107

  Despite their important contribution to workers’ diets, factory meals were not particularly impressive. One Russian worker recalled that her factory served ‘a thin soup made of gritts [corn porridge], or beet leaves, or nettles, or rarely cabbage. The second dish is gritts or potatoes, (or rarely) meat – little fresh meat, mostly herring or hard coarse sausage made of meat scraps’.108 This supplemented her 600 grams of ration bread. War workers in a factory in Kuibyshev were given watery soup and an occasional glass of milk made from milk powder.109 At Sakharov’s factory, for lunch each worker was given ‘a few spoonfuls of millet porridge mixed with American powdered eggs’. The porridge was served on ‘sheets of paper and eaten on the spot, washed down with ersatz tea’. There were no utensils available. Demonstrating the ingenuity of the wartime factories, their shop ‘eventually managed to stamp out spoons’ for all the workers.110

  The principle of privilege was maintained even under these grievous circumstances. Directors, managers and engineers ate in separate canteens where more and higher-quality food was served. In Leningrad during the siege, bread, sugar, cutlets and small pies were said to have been available at the canteen for the party headquarters at Smolny.111 Agrippina Khromova recalled how at her plant in Moscow, ‘when I worked as a forewoman, they gave me special food rations. We ate in a dining hall and then went home. But the rations weren’t given out to everybody. It was a terrible thing. You sat, you ate, and people were standing behind you and waiting; maybe something would be left, and they could eat.’112

  Miners, defence industry workers labouring under particularly difficult conditions, and a number of selected factories were eventually given extra bread rations.113 But despite the advantages of a bigger bread ration and supplementary soups made from vegetables grown in the factory gardens, many workers would only have been eating somewhere around 2,000 calories a day, which was insufficient to maintain the health of a person undertaking strenuous physical activity who really needed between 3,500 and 4,000 calories.114 If German workers on their more generous rations lost weight, the Soviet workers must also have lost a considerable amount of weight over the course of the war. The evidence for the rest of the Soviet Union is scanty, but in Leningrad it was common for workers who were not emaciated and who appeared to feel well to suddenly collapse and die, afflicted by a metabolic crisis induced by starvation.115 Aviation workers in Kuibyshev were also recorded as having collapsed on the assembly line.116 There are no records of how many workers died from hunger and exhaustion at their workplace but it does not seem improbable that there would have been thousands of such deaths.

  It is incredible that Soviet workers managed to put in a gruelling working day of between twelve and sixteen hours and ‘in the middle years of the war … produced three aircraft for every two German, and almost double the number of tanks’.117 In 1942 the concentration on armaments production, which had put such enormous strain on the entire system, began to pay off. In this year the factories began to supply not only enough ammunition to keep the soldiers fighting but also better equipment and this was channelled into a restructured army. Stalin conceded that the military command was better off in the hands of his more competent generals. New tank corps, using the formidable T-34 tanks, were joined by fast-moving armed units which deployed the Katyusha rockets, greatly feared by the Germans.118 By the end of 1942 the Soviets could concentrate seventy to eighty tanks along a kilometre of the front line, whereas in 1941 they had been able to muster only three.119 The Red Army first matched and then overtook the Wehrmacht in terms of firepower, and the balance shifted from manpower to weaponry. Indeed, it was the sheer amount of Soviet firepower which eventually defeated the Germans.120 In the autumn of 1943, Guy Sajer, ‘plodding … at the rate of three miles an hour’ along the Konotop–Kiev road in flight from the Red Army, recalled ‘our mobility, which had always given us an advantage over the vast but slow Soviet formations, was now only a memory, and the disproportion of numbers made even flight a doubtful prospect. Moreover, the equipment of the Red Army was constantly improving, and we often found ourselves pitted against extremely mobile motorized regiments of fresh troops.’121 Lend-lease equipment from America also helped. American-supplied radios and telephones improved communications. American trucks liberated the Soviets from the limitations of their network of rail and horse-drawn wagons while freeing up Soviet factories to concentrate on tank manufacture.122 Then, in July 1943, the tank battle at Kursk ‘ended any realistic prospect of German victory in the east’ and the Red Army began the long slow battle to push the Wehrmacht back towards the German border.123

  By 1943 the supplementary industries – producing coal, steel and other raw materials as well as power – and the railways, were no longer lurching from crisis to crisis and had recovered to some extent.124 The civilian economy was running again in most places, even if at a low ebb. Breakdowns continued to occur but in isolation. The likelihood of complete collapse across the entire nation was no longer imminent. Soviet central planning eventually proved itself amazingly effective in organizing the industrial economy but it remained entirely inadequate when it came to feeding the general population.125

  In 1942 the communist government, which before the war had tried to take responsibility for every crumb of food eaten by the urban population, now openly changed its tactics and devolved responsibility for finding food on to the individual. President Mikhail Kalinin told the Soviet people, ‘if you wish to take part in the victory over the German fascist invaders, then you must plant as many potatoes as possible’.126 In Britain digging for victory provided people with supplementary vitamins and variety in the diet, whereas in the Soviet Union it made a real difference to people’s chances of survival. Margaret Wettlin, an American married to a Russian theatre director, recalled that it took time for people’s gardening efforts to bear fruit and it was not until 1943 that the gardening campaign really made an impact on people’s diets. ‘All Russia was gripped by the garden campaign. Plots were distributed to individuals and groups through factories and institutions. Posters reminded that potatoes were a substitute for bread. Newspapers and magazines were full of articles teaching and advising amateur gardeners how to get a crop. There was a nightly and especially a week-end exodus to the suburbs, with travellers on the trams armed with spades and hoes neatly wrapped up to avoid injury to fellow passengers.’127 The number of private gardens tripled between 1942 and 1944.128 Irene Rush recalled that in the summer of 1943 Moscow ‘floated in a green sea of potato plants. Even rubbish tips had been cleared of rubbish, levelled out and neatly planted.’129 Rush and her friends fried the potatoes in a ‘smelly kind of greenish oil that people dubbed American machine oil’.130 Potatoes became known as the ‘second bread’.131 If food became bland and monotonous in Britain or Germany, it was far worse in the Soviet Union where the meals often consisted only of potatoes. ‘People cooked nothing but potatoes. They boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, roasted potatoes. They made potato cakes, potato soup, potato fritters. But every effort to disguise t
he outer form left the soul of the potato unchanged. You could see this when people paled on biting into the latest deception.’132

  In a rather more desperate effort to extend food supplies the Soviet Academy of Sciences gathered together a commission to assess the suitability for human consumption of a range of wild meats. The list included foxes, gophers and mice, and a pamphlet on feral meat was produced which advised that squirrel meat contained more calories than pork. Leaflets were also printed detailing how to cook nettles, which are rich in protein and vitamins.133 It seems quite likely that the hungry Soviets took the nutritionists’ advice. Lydia Usova recalled sitting in a park during the siege of Leningrad, ‘watching sparrows hopping about, and I found I had purely felt instincts – if only I could catch one of the sparrows and make soup of it! … there were the weeds we began to eat. In the mornings I would get up at about four o’clock and go to any refuse dump and pick nettles. If I managed to collect a handkerchief full it was wonderful!’134

  In the extreme conditions of the war, the communist regime allowed the revival of the system of collective farm markets which it had long been trying to suppress. In effect it legitimized, or at least turned a blind eye to, the black market. The farm markets were the only places where milk and vegetables were sold.135 The Australian diplomat J. A. Alexander noted that at the government store where he bought his food ‘there were no eggs, fresh milk, fruit or vegetables to be bought at any price’.136 The peasants were struggling to feed themselves, and as the quantity of food sold at these markets fell significantly the scarcity of food meant that collective market prices were astronomical.137 In the 1930s a kilogram of potatoes on the collective farm market cost one rouble, compared to 18 kopeks in the state-run stores. In August 1944 Alexander noted that in the Moscow markets ‘half a dozen lbs [2.7 kg] of potatoes costs 20 roubles’.138 Only those with wealth, in the form of either cash or good-quality clothes and other household goods, were able to benefit fully from the markets. Nikolai Novikov, a middle-ranking Soviet diplomat who was evacuated to Kuibyshev, complained bitterly that his family’s ration was insufficient to feed even the children. He was fortunate to be able to barter the family’s clothes for butter, meat and milk.139 Margaret Wettlin observed that the Soviets were willing to barter anything they had for food. ‘People had developed the most absolute indifference to things … Only life was important … Dresses could go, furs could go, watches could go, shoes could go, everything formerly cherished could go without so much as a hanging on with the eyes. People would come in naked to the finish. And they did not care.’140 But many Soviets had neither money nor spare clothes. For those without such capital, bread became an alternative currency. It was forbidden to exchange ration bread for any other foodstuff, but in the collective farm market in Kuibyshev one kilogram of black bread, or about two days’ ration for a worker in the defence industry, could buy 300 grams of meat, or 160 grams of butter, perhaps six eggs, or 2 litres of milk, or 2 kilograms of potatoes.141