Irene Rush, who struggled through the war on the minuscule ration allowance of a non-industrial worker, could not really afford the collective farm markets. By the winter of 1942 her diet was reduced to soup made from dried potato peelings and the ration bread of 400 grams a day, supplemented by a little horseradish or mustard, ‘a little lump of sugar for our faintly coloured hot water (tea)’, and an occasional half pint of milk or half a cabbage bought at the peasant market for twenty times the normal price.142 She and her friends, with their clothes hanging off their bodies, had begun to look like ‘waxworks figures that had started to melt’.143 Instead of bartering at the markets she would (illegally) go out into the countryside along with vast numbers of Muscovites with rucksacks packed with ‘lace curtains, needles, combs, dress materials and shoes … and even hand sewing machines and gramophones’.144 If they were fortunate, they returned with them stuffed full of potatoes and cabbages. Irene and her friends would also try to find work on the collective farms so that they would have access to vegetables. Nevertheless, their ‘faces grew puffy with dropsy and lack of vitamins’.145 Like the Red Army soldiers she and her flatmate used to make a bitter vitamin C brew out of pine needles steeped in water.146
THE AMERICAN LIFELINE
In 1943 the Soviet Union overtook Britain as the principal recipient of American lend-lease food. Shipments of lend-lease equipment and food began arriving in the Soviet Union in November 1941. But between 1941 and 1943 the Soviet Union only received about 30 per cent of the amount of food sent to Britain.147 In 1943 this shifted and it is estimated that lend-lease foodstuffs increased the availability of sugar and vegetables in the Soviet Union by as much as a half, and the availability of meat by one-fifth, while it probably doubled the amount of fats in the country.148 Without the American supplies of food many more Soviet civilians would undoubtedly have starved to death.
Food made up only 14 per cent of the total lend-lease tonnage but, apart from cereals and grains, it consisted of highly concentrated foods, such as dehydrated vegetables and eggs, canned meat, milk, butter and fruits and vegetables, dried fruits and nuts.149 Soviet documentation, which would help to assess exactly how significant lend-lease food was, is lacking, but its important contribution to the war effort is indicated by the fact that food and raw materials were the two items for which Stalin always pressed the hardest.150 Lend-lease food would have been sufficient to provide one pound (or just under half a kilogram) of high-quality, high-calorie food per day for 6 million soldiers.151 As they opened American cans, Soviet soldiers are said to have joked, ‘Well boys, here is the opening of the Second Front.’152 Canned meat may have been a poor substitute for military intervention in the west but the soldiers were grateful for the copious tins of Spam. These replaced the dried fish which had been virtually the only source of protein in the front-line ration. Dried fish had two distinct disadvantages. It did little to satisfy hunger and it made the soldiers very thirsty. Drinking to relieve the thirst was no trivial matter for a rifleman in a foxhole within range of German snipers as it meant that he needed to urinate frequently. Spam solved this problem while it also satisfied the stomach, was far higher in calories, and was immune to the depredations of rats while in storage.153
Most of the American food probably went to feed the army but workers in key defence plants were allocated some of the supplies. The egg and milk powder and the chocolate that industrial workers remember being given was all probably American lend-lease food. While in Britain dried egg was among the most reviled of wartime foods, in the Soviet Union its protein and energy were extremely valuable to workers surviving on a fare of watery soups. Ordinary Russians probably did not see much of the American bounty, although late in the war Irene Rush did mention supplementing her home-grown potatoes ‘with American supplies of condensed milk and fat pork’.154 Even though the great majority of Soviets never had a chance to savour American tinned goods, by filling some of the army and industrial workers’ rations the lend-lease supplies took some of the pressure off the home-grown Soviet food stocks, leaving a little more to go round for the ordinary civilian. It certainly provided some relief for the broken peasantry who were at the limits of their capabilities and simply could not release more food without starving themselves.155 In addition, the thousands of tons of vegetable seeds which the Americans sent to the Soviet Union aided the setting up of kitchen gardens and allotments.156 Towards the end of the war lend-lease food may even have supported as much as one-third of the average civilian calorie consumption.157 A Russian lathe operator who defected after the war may have been buttering up his American interviewer but he claimed that ‘we soldiers realized that our boots, jackets, trousers, food, everything – came from the Americans. Every soldier understood that, if it were not for America’s help, we would not have won. For we had no food, no clothing.’158
In 1943 pressure on the peasants to supply ever larger quantities of food for the fighting forces was further relieved by the application of the principle of self-sufficiency to the Red Army’s own food supply. That year the military set up 5,000 farms producing meat and fish, milk, eggs, potatoes, mushrooms and green vegetables. By 1944 these were able to cover a good proportion of the protein requirements of the standard military ration.159 In combination with lend-lease the farms meant that, in the last two years of the war, Red Army soldiers were finally guaranteed a ration that contained more calories and a better quality of food than the civilian ration. In 1944 and 1945 Red Army soldiers consumed, per capita, 39.7 pounds of fat a year, more than double the amount allotted to civilians.160 For many who joined the army in the last years of the war it was the first time they had eaten two meals a day since 1941. One recruit, who joined the army in November 1943, remembered how fortunate he felt to be eating potatoes: ‘I had no meat, but I got potatoes. You were lucky if you got to peel potatoes. You could keep the skins. To go to the kitchen was like a holiday.’161 The improvements did not eradicate hunger from the Red Army ranks. A soldier sent to guard a warehouse of lend-lease food in Archangel in 1944 was overcome by temptation: ‘I was so hungry and there was so much food. I decided to take a box … I took a whole case of tushonka [canned meat], sugar and dried bread. I realized that I shouldn’t do this but I opened a can of tushonka and ate it. Then I left my post and went to my superior and told him I had the food. He kissed me. We went and ate a couple of cans’.162
In 1943 the Red Army began to push the Wehrmacht out of occupied territory and was able to requisition large quantities of food from the previously occupied peasants. The liberated areas provided the soldiers moving through with half of their flour requirements, almost all the vegetables and meat they needed, as well as fodder. This indicates just how ineffective the German occupation forces had been in requisitioning food from the peasantry. The Soviets were equally ruthless in their policy of feeding the army at the expense of their own people and far more efficient in extracting food. When the Red Army occupied other countries it proved itself as pitiless as the Wehrmacht. As the Soviets moved through Hungary and Romania the military ration was increased, first by 15 and then by 34 per cent.163
Once the Red Army reached East Prussia its vengeance was unleashed on the German civilian population in an orgy of rape and plunder. In many towns Soviet soldiers raped every German woman, regardless of her age. Confronted with the comparative wealth, even of wartime Germany, the Soviets were at a loss to understand why the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union. What could such a prosperous nation have hoped to gain from such a poor one?164 When a Ukrainian rail engineer first arrived in Germany with the Red Army he was amazed. ‘We would walk into an apartment and there would be some old man there. We would look around and see how he was living and we would say, “You must be a bourgeois!” And he would say, quite timidly, “No, I am just an ordinary worker; I have been working all my life.” And here the fellow was living in three or four rooms! When the young people in the army saw this sort of thing, they became convinced by the evidence
of their own eyes that the Soviet propaganda had been giving them great lies.’165 The Ukrainian took part in the looting of German homes. Mirroring the ‘Führerpakete’, which encouraged German troops to bring home as much food as they could carry when they went on leave from the occupied territories, Soviet troops were given permission ‘to send packages home, ten kilograms a month’, but the shops were empty. ‘So we would go into a German’s apartment together and simply clear out the place and send everything that we took home. We were especially interested in getting clothes, because we knew that in the Soviet Union all the people had were rags. Of course, the order did not say that we were permitted to loot the Germans’ houses, but it was really implied in it. Anyway, no one ever stopped us.’166
PERSEVERANCE DESPITE HUNGER
A Soviet citizen’s average daily intake of calories between 1942 and 1943 is estimated to have been 2,555 calories. In 1944, the amount is thought to have increased to 2,810 calories. This was a sign that the war had turned a corner.167 This quantity of food would be perfectly sufficient to sustain relatively sedentary contemporary lives but it was far below what was necessary to sustain health and energy in the tough everyday life of the Soviet citizen in wartime. The Soviets survived on far less food than all other combatant nations except the Japanese. They consumed at least 500 calories less than the average British or German civilian, while Americans were, on average, consuming at least 1,000 more calories a day than a Soviet. However, the picture conveyed by averages fails to convey the unreliability of the food supply, the periods of shortages and severe lack of food, the fact that food was distributed unequally across the population, so that while the communist elite might stuff themselves on stewed meat for breakfast, the dispossessed and hungry were reduced to licking the plates after others had finished their meal. A dependant’s or non-manual worker’s ration of 200 to 400 grams of sub-standard bread meant that it took great ingenuity to scrape together enough to eat. Irene Rush recalled, ‘how we hungered for and enjoyed that meagre food! We were always hungry an hour or two before it was time to eat; and by meal time, a piece of dry bread tasted like manna from heaven.’168 This is not the statement of a person living comfortably on 2,555 calories a day. From the evidence which fills in the picture of averages it is safe to conclude that only a tiny minority of the privileged were eating the actual number of calories that their bodies required. The majority of Soviet civilians were severely undernourished.
Apart from the problem that the food did not fill the Soviets’ energy requirements, it was nutritionally sub-standard. The Soviet Union was the only European nation to suffer from an outbreak of scurvy during the Second World War. The irregular and deficient diet caused gastritis, stomach ulcers, dysentery, diarrhoea and vitamin C, K and A deficiencies.169 Even the Australian diplomat J. A. Alexander, who had privileged access to food, suffered from his virtually vitamin-free diet. Only one month after his arrival in the country in August 1944 he had ‘lost a good deal of weight …We are finding our urgent food needs here to maintain health are milk, vegetables, fruit and fruit juices.’ In October he complained that he had not had ‘a fresh egg or any fresh milk since I arrived’.170 The Soviet birth-rate fell by half during the war and disease flourished. Typhus, a sickness which goes hand in hand with malnourishment and poor hygiene, increased greatly, although the government did manage to implement effective measures, including disinfecting every train passenger before a journey, which prevented a raging epidemic.171
The breakdown of ordinary civilian life was a serious threat to the war effort. But the appalling food situation was never so bad that there were not enough soldiers to fight on the front line or workers to struggle on the industrial assembly line. The impressive wartime achievements of the Soviet Union were, however, achieved at a terrible cost. The lives of the entire population were reduced to nagging hunger and grinding drudgery. Daily life was a perpetual misery. Kemp Tolley, sent to Komsomolsk to check on the use of lend-lease equipment, was filled with sadness ‘that fellow humans should have to exist in such hardship, without a shred of beauty, no control over their private destiny – in effect, human manure that will hopefully fertilize and improve the lives of succeeding generations’.172
Once the war was over, starvation was never mentioned by Stalin. Indeed, wishing to disguise the weaknesses of the post-war Soviet Union, he was only prepared to admit to 7 million war deaths, a figure which does not even cover the 9 million military casualties.173 The starvation of the besieged Leningraders received no official acknowledgement. When the Leningrad poet Olga Berggolts visited Moscow at the end of 1942 she was shocked to find that while the Muscovites talked of the people of Leningrad as heroes they had no idea that they had starved to death defending their city. Berggolts was in Moscow to give a radio interview. She was told, ‘no recollections of the starvation. None, none. On the courage, on the heroism of the Leningraders, that’s what we need … But not a word about hunger.’174 The unacknowledged loss of millions of Soviet civilians to starvation could only be imposed upon a population by a dictatorship at ease with the notion that the lives of the majority of its people were expendable. However, given the pressing circumstances of the war, the Soviet government could probably not have fed its people much better. The Soviets had little room for manoeuvre. Admittedly, the problems of the agricultural system were partially self-imposed but there was no time or spare capacity to address them during the war. And in order to make as much food available to the urban population as possible the communist regime did abandon its principles and re-open the free market in food.
Germany and Britain feared that hunger, let alone starvation, would undermine morale to such an extent that this would bring the war effort to a halt. No such collapse in morale appears to have occurred in the Soviet Union. The people were used to shortages and difficult living conditions, and the fact that it was clear that the government was prepared to sacrifice the peasantry to hunger before the urban population contributed to the morale of the urban civilians, who kept the economy running. Moreover, the youth of the Soviet Union had been brought up to believe in the communist struggle. A sincere belief in collectivism and the political conviction that communism would bring about a better future undoubtedly motivated many of the young. Vladimir Ivanovich Mikhailov was nineteen when the war began. When he first went to the front his sincere belief in the ‘spirit of internationalism’ made it hard for him to fight the Germans. ‘I thought, these are probably the workers of the Ruhr, the dockers of Hamburg … how on earth can this be?’175 Once he realized that the National Socialists were intent on destroying the Soviet Union he fought with fervour despite suffering from terrible hunger pangs. ‘We endured. But I remember what a human turns into, consumed by this terrible feeling of hunger.’176 Many in the generation born in the 1920s seem to have been imbued with this spirit of sacrifice. For them the war was one more test of the Soviet people on the road toward the triumphant attainment of the communist ideal.177
The spirit of sacrifice which undoubtedly permeated the entire wartime Soviet population was not, however, always directed towards the support of communism but was inspired by more personal motives. Victor Kravchenko admired the sense of purpose and motivation among the workers. When there was a rush order they would ‘remain in their factories for many days without a break, snatching some sleep on the premises … I watched them working in one shop when the shop next-door had been turned into a blazing hell by a direct bomb hit. I know that these plain people were the real heroes and the real strength of the Russian war … They were struggling to give all possible support to their sons and brothers and fathers at the fighting fronts.’178 In addition, fear should not be underestimated as a motivating factor in the Soviet Union. The purges of the 1930s had created an atmosphere of terror within society, and the labour camp was a tangible and horrible prospect which kept workers and peasants at their posts and discouraged open expressions of discontent. However, many Soviets felt that the cloud of repression
lifted slightly during the war. Andrei Sakharov noted a temporary release from ‘the daily grind of a totalitarian, bureaucratic society’ which allowed the workers a measure of pride and dignity, which they relished.179 There was certainly a widespread although misplaced hope that after the war the regime would soften and life would improve.
The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food Page 42
