CHAPTER 3

The State’s Pot and the Soldier’s Spoon

Rations in the Red Army

Without a spoon, just as without a rifle, it is impos sible to wage war.

—Aleksandr Lesin

Aleksandr Lesin, who wrote the above lines, came to understand all too well how important being fed was to being able to fight. He served on the benighted Kalinin Front. In the spring of 1942, Lesin participated in an offensive that bogged down as starving and exhausted soldiers failed to take their objectives.1 The Kalinin Front eventually became a lightning rod attracting Moscow’s attention to the needs of soldiers’ stomachs.

On May 31, 1943, Stalin signed an order underlining the failure of the Kalinin Front to properly feed its troops. Stalin found a “criminally irresponsible, un-Soviet attitude toward soldier’s food” among those responsible for feeding the army: “Apparently our commanders have forgotten the best traditions of the Russian Army, of such eminent commanders as Suvorov and Kutuzov” who “demonstrated fatherly care about the everyday life and rations of soldiers.” Concern for soldiers’ well-being was posited as a “sacred duty” that commanders often ignored. Stalin drew on national and revolutionary traditions to shame officers into fulfilling their duties. Soldiers had been assured that the government was capable of providing for them. But failure was everywhere. “The Kalinin Front is not an exception,” Stalin noted; “similar conditions occur on other fronts.” Stalin’s order was distributed to all fronts as a warning.² Alongside highlighting failure and prescribing punishments, the document provided extensive corrective prescriptions, reinforcing and setting norms that would remain fundamental through 1945. This document, as Stalin’s word, marked the culmination of a flurry of similar inspections in 1942–1943. It reflected and constructed Soviet norms and expectations of nourishment during a total war that called on citizens to make great sacrifices.3

In the first years of the war the Soviet Union lost its bread basket, making hunger inevitable. Under these conditions the government’s dedication to provide was reaffirmed to soldiers, who were promised ample provisions in return for their service. This ideological commitment and the very real consequences of fighting a war on an empty stomach made breakdowns in provisioning deeply disturbing, prompting the government to reaffirm its role as provider.

This chapter explores the quotidian details of provisioning, a material embodiment of the bond between Red Army soldiers to the Soviet government during the war. It was difficult to imagine such a key resource as food outside of the horizontal bonds between citizens and the vertical relationship to the state. The very term used for rations, paëk, implied mutual obligations. Paëk could be seen as the physical embodiment of the socialist adage “to each according to his work,” as its etymological root implied an earned share in a common cause.⁴ We will see how rations were assembled by the government and later received and used by soldiers at the front—how paëk functioned, was experienced, and occasionally transformed by soldiers.⁵

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first describes how the government thought of rationing, where it drew its resources, and what it sought to provide. The second examines failures in the provisioning system and how standards improved as the war continued. The third describes how soldiers used rations and responded to failures. Rations were a key resource in setting the army apart as a separate class of citizens and in creating clear hierarchies within the army; they both brought together and divided those in the ranks.

The State Provides: What and How

In 1941–1942, the Soviet Union lost vast resources to the rapacious Wehrmacht. Even by 1945, after the war had shifted to enemy territory, the gross production of the Soviet food industry stood at half of the level of 1940.⁶ When Stalin issued his famous “Not One Step Backward” order (227) in the summer of 1942, he pointed out that if the army retreated any farther, it would be dooming itself to starvation: “The territory of the USSR, which the enemy has seized and strives to seize, is bread and other foodstuffs for the army and rear, metal and fuel for industry, factories and plants, supplying the army with weapons and ammunition, rail roads… Every new scrap of land we leave to the enemy will in every way possible strengthen the enemy and in every way possible weaken our defense and our Motherland.”7 Food was a resource that could mean the difference between victory and defeat, one that would feed you or the enemy in a zero-sum equation. As a result, both sides used scorched-earth tactics whenever they were forced to retreat, leaving civilians in a dire situation.⁸ Forced to wage war regardless of a catastrophic loss of material, Soviet leaders strived to establish total control over food distribution under the chaotic conditions of a war it was clearly losing, as well as refining a hierarchy around what was arguably its most vital resource.

Despite these immense losses, in the course of the war the Soviets were able to provide more and more adequately for the military. In 1941 as many resources as possible were evacuated to the east, and agricultural production shifted there as well. The full-scale development of agriculture in the east, American Lend-Lease aid, and the recapture of resources led to palpable improvements in 1943.⁹

The Rationale of Rationing

Paëk, a common term for rations, revealed a certain moral economy of provisioning.¹⁰ Paëk came from the Turkic root pai, which meant “share, part in a common cause, coming through mutual agreement to every individual, in the paying or receiving of a monetary sum or other form of personal property.”¹¹ The root had close associations with an individual’s “part, fate, destiny, and happiness,” and a participant in a common enterprise such as a cooperative was often called a paishchik.¹² The root itself presupposed the necessity of a common cause and mutual obligations in the circulation of rations; it is not a form of welfare but part of a bargain based on who earned what.¹³ Yet the term also spoke to a certain ambiguity about who owned the paëk—the government or the soldier. This was never fully resolved.

Pai-based understandings of state-citizen relations had been key to how both the Imperial Army in 1914 and the Bolsheviks in 1918 apportioned resources. The paika, a special ration issued to soldiers’ families in time of war, was instituted by the tsarist government in 1912 and later adopted by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. Joshua Sanborn notes that paika was a manifestation of the government’s understanding that it had a reciprocal relationship with soldiers and owed both them and their families more than other citizens. It was also a powerful tool to control soldiers’ actions—cutting off the paika could leave a family to starve.¹⁴

Rations had to keep soldiers functioning while taking up minimal space and weight in their packs or on supply wagons.15 This logic gave fats and carbohydrates a privileged place. Both provided a high number of calories per volume and a feeling of satiation. Meat (especially salt pork and sausage) and potatoes were looked upon as ideal ingredients, and bread the fundamental foodstuff.¹⁶ The war forced a new set of norms on the army, established in September 1941, that would remain essential until 1945.¹⁷

The range of calories guaranteed to men under arms varied depending on position. A manual for fel’dshers (medical assistants) published on the eve of the war stated that a person in a state of total relaxation needed 1,700 calories, a tractor driver 3,000.¹⁸ A soldier could receive between 3,088 and 4,692 according to different estimates. An official history of the rear-area services claimed that soldiers received between 2,659 calories (in the rear) to 3,450 (for soldiers at the front) to 4,712 (for airmen) according to the September 1941 norms.¹⁹ Frontline soldiers were to receive 3,505 calories. Control over calories became a common part of frontline inspections, which were also supposed to insure balanced nutrition.²⁰

Any system of mass catering imagines a more or less generic body that it will be feeding, ignoring to some degree differences in age, sex, and mass that might warrant special attention, not to mention culturally constructed differences that could also be of significance.²¹ Red Army provisioning practically ignored these differences, which was in line with prewar provisioning in the Soviet Union. But in other armies—such as the British and French— adherence to ethnic and religious tradition was used as a way to discipline soldiers drawn from the colonies. Utilizing differences as a form of rule was a hallmark of imperial thinking. Red Army soldiers were seen as citizens of a modern state, and as such their paëk was supposed to be universal and rationalized.²² The Red Army redefined its soldiers’ identities by specialization and rank: who a person was did not depended on where they were from or which God they prayed to, but rather on their rank, specialization, and location, all of which impacted what kind of food they received.

Rations followed several trajectories: up the ranks, from the rear to the front, the changing of seasons and climate zones, and finally, soldiers’ specializations. Commanders, as the heads of the military units, received a supplemental ration (doppaëk), which included extra meat, cookies, and higher-quality tobacco—an extra 450 calories, totaling 3,490–4,000 calories per day.²³ The hierarchy of rations had an impact on soldiers’ language—strong tea was referred to as “general’s tea.”²⁴ Those serving in frigid climates, such as the Karelian Isthmus or Far North, received special rations of extra vodka, salt pork, and vitamin C (154 additional calories).²⁵ In winter (from October until April) soldiers were given one hundred extra grams (3.5 oz.) of bread. Those recovering from wounds had a different set of norms and specific food.26 The closer soldiers were to the front, the more rations they were entitled to. Simply put, in risking their lives and thus most directly contributing to the war effort, frontline soldiers earned more resources.²⁷ Soldiers at the front received roughly twice the amount of bread as those in training, and roughly three times the amount of bread as those in hospitals. This logic translated into civilian rations, where the more directly civilians’ jobs contributed to the war effort, the more calories they were given.²⁸ Specialized troops received particular kinds of rations. Pilots were given a highly portable ration that included condensed milk and chocolate in case of fatigue or an emergency landing. Reconnaissance troops took special rations with them onto enemy territory, while elite formations received additional rations, including much-coveted white bread.²⁹

Some privileges seemed based on biological needs, others on status. Soldiers at the front needed more energy because they were engaged in strenuous combat, but they also deserved more because they were risking their lives. Among the items included in rations were tobacco, rolling paper, matches, and vodka—none of which were necessary for physical survival, but all of which were deficit items that carried important social weight.³⁰

As a result of multivector norms, the volume and composition of rations could vary dramatically.³¹ Soldiers in the rear were nearly unanimous in their complaints of hunger while undergoing training, and kitchen duty was a much sought-after assignment.³² Grigorii Baklanov recalled of the rear-area diet: “you’ll live, but even in your sleep you won’t have sinful thoughts.”³³ Many looked forward to going to the front as a place where they could finally get enough to eat.³⁴

Locavores, Pillagers, and Boxed Lunches

As the war progressed, responsibility for feeding soldiers became increasingly localized, some claiming that the army provided itself with 65 percent of its provisions.³⁵ In the first months, it was typical to appeal to higher ranks and invest them with sole control over both food and transport.³⁶ In the first two years of the war, the authority and competencies of rear-area officers were expanded and their personal responsibility clarified. While central reserves provided necessities that could not be produced locally, subsidiary agriculture (podsobnoe khoziaistvo) accounted for more and more of people’s diets. Unlike their US or Commonwealth allies, Red Army soldiers often produced the rations they were eating and knew who prepared them. Agricultural work became a common duty of men and women in uniform, as military units began to tend their own rear-area farms and soldiers were sent to assist local collective farms.37

Red Army personnel were, to a great extent, locavores, in contrast to their US and British allies and similar to their Wehrmacht foe. The United States had taken pains to develop its famous C and K Rations—prepackaged, ready-to-eat, standardized, and self-sufficient meals, containing everything from a can opener, wooden spoon, entrée, and dessert to gum, cigarettes, matches, and toilet paper, all prominently displaying brand names.³⁸ However, US soldiers quickly grew tired of quartermaster officers’ over-reliance on a limited assortment of canned goods, which became the subject of postwar inquiries.³⁹ The British were similar to the Americans, being primarily an expeditionary force, but their rations were simpler. The Wehrmacht combined ready-to-eat items with those needing preparation and were notorious foragers, often living off what they pillaged from Soviet peasants.⁴⁰ Indeed the Reich’s strategy called for the extermination by famine of millions of Soviet citizens.⁴¹ The Red Army relied heavily on whatever was available locally, drawing from central reserves when local reserves failed.⁴² Red Army forces planned on feeding soldiers whenever possible with hot, fresh food from field kitchens located just behind the front line, with mobile bakeries, kitchens, and even herds of livestock in tow.

The provisioning methods of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army relied on similar logic: a preference for field kitchens, the issuance of a variety of ready-to-eat items in the event that a hot meal was unfeasible, and the extensive use of local resources. There was, of course, a significant difference between their provisioning strategies. The Red Army, for most of the war, was taking from its own citizens in an economy that treated all resources as “the people’s,” and thus constituting a horizontal connection between provider and defender. This was in sharp contrast to the Nazi strategy of exploiting racial “others,” most of whom were slotted for extermination or enslavement. Wherever they were provisioning, the Red Army showed concern for the feeding of local civilians. Local provisioning, a key aspect of the Soviet ration system, obscured the borders between military and civilian. Both combatants and wide swaths of the civilian population received rations during the war, but soldiers were much better fed.

The Menu

The menu at the front often impressed those who had been wasting away in the rear.⁴³ Whenever possible, soldiers at the front were to be provided with hot, fresh food by field kitchens twice a day.44 Hot food was to be brought up just before dawn and just after dark with bread and meat for lunch.⁴⁵ The soldier’s meal was supposed to consist of two dishes—a soup and a porridge—and tea, brought up in twelve-liter thermoses.⁴⁶ In practice this was often combined into one dish.⁴⁷ Cooks were supposed to divide the ration so that every soldier received the same portion of meat in their soup or kasha.⁴⁸ Frontline menus varied greatly, but could become monotonous as one dish became constant.⁴⁹

The Red Army veteran and food historian Vil’iam Pokhlёbkin noted that priorities during the war ignored assortment in favor of sufficiency and practicality in provisioning, centering on “basic products, without which not one person in the rear or at the front can exist… first of all, bread and salt… [then] meat and fish, fats and vegetables… What kind of meat, which kind of fats—this is all unimportant.”⁵⁰ An official table of exchange existed to ensure that each soldier received the proper number of calories. The government saw categories in terms of meat, bread, grains, vegetables, and so on, without attention to whether the meat was pork or beef or rabbit or fish, or whether it was canned or smoked or fresh or even took the form of powdered eggs—which concentrated calories but were unpalatable.⁵¹ Meat was meat (or anything with fat and protein), bread was bread (whether dried into crouton-like sukhari or fresh-baked). Provisioning, at least initially and primarily, was concerned with caloric, not culinary, value. Provisioning officers made concessions to taste by the continued use and inclusion of basic spices (bay leaf, salt, pepper, onions, sometimes garlic) in rations.⁵²

Field kitchens were supposed to service no more than 180 soldiers but often served 300 or more. The kitchens consisted of three pots (soup, kasha, and tea) on wheels, with an oven. They could be so close to the front as to endanger the cook’s life or so far that food would be doled out cold.⁵³ Cooks were supposed to provide nourishment to their comrades a few hundred meters or a few kilometers in front of them, but their ability to do so varied depending on their skills, the resources available to the rear area, and conditions at the front.

In battle, in echelon, and whenever troops found themselves too far from a field kitchen, two types of ration provided them with sustenance: the NZ and dry rations (sukhpaëk). The neprikosnovennyi zapas (literally “untouchable reserve”; in the British and German armies referred to as “Iron Rations”), or NZ (sometimes referred to as nosimyi zapas—“portable reserve”), was carried in a soldier’s knapsack at all times, consumed only with a commander’s authorization.⁵⁴ However, experience showed that soldiers could eat them surreptitiously.⁵⁵ The NZ typically consisted of canned or smoked meat, tea, sugar, salt, and dried bread.56 The dry rations, often distinguishable only by not being labeled “NZ,” were slightly more generous. They consisted partially of things soldiers could prepare themselves, such as concentrated soups and grains, and partially of ready-to-eat items, such as dried bread and canned food. Preparation was difficult, as the army failed to provide enough dry spirits (alcohol that burned without smoke) to allow soldiers to cook these concentrates, while starting a fire could draw enemy fire and prove fatal.⁵⁷ Eventually concentrated soups and grains were reserved for field kitchens.⁵⁸

The contents of NZ and dry rations varied dramatically: they could be freshly slaughtered boiled lamb, salt pork, lard, compressed animal fats, sardines, sausage, or American Spam (sarcastically referred to as “Second Front”), or a variety of goods, depending on what was available.⁵⁹ Canned goods were often unlabeled.⁶⁰ Pokhlëbkin remembered different kinds of NZ and sukhpaëk that had been provided to him from the “hard, dingy, yellowish-gray chunks” of kombizhir (combined fats) in 1942 to American lard in 1943 to a beautifully smoked piece of Hungarian or German salt pork in 1944. He mused that the NZ’s “character changed in relation to historical and military conditions.”⁶¹ The food that soldiers received depended on a variety of factors largely beyond their control, factors that treated fat and meat as the same thing and where calories were king.

During the war, food was the deficit resource, something that everyone needed. By creating a hierarchy of distribution, the government directly ranked whose contribution was most significant to its continued survival and made providing for those who were risking their lives for the Soviet Union their first priority. Soldiers were keenly aware of being better fed than their families. Ibragim Gazi wrote his wife and child that “As soon as we get a chance to eat something good, I say: this is for kids, and our children probably don’t have this.”⁶² While soldiers might feel guilt, they generally felt the pangs of hunger less acutely than their families in the rear or under German occupation.

An Inviolable Camp: Rhetoric, Realities, and Explaining Failures

Boris Slutskii reflected on the realpolitik of the stomach just after the war: “The cruel antitheft laws of war, executions of chauffeurs for two packs of concentrates, were necessitated by the famished convulsions of a country that robbed its own rear to fatten its front.”⁶³ While such a policy left children, dependents, and the elderly with the smallest rations, in some cases condemning them to death, it fit with the logic of a sovereign power struggling for survival during total war.64

One of the clear messages sent by the Soviet state at the front was that the USSR could provide for its men under arms only so long as they stopped retreating. In his November 6, 1941, address to the Red Army (when German troops had reached the Moscow suburbs), Stalin described how the hardships of the war “converted the family of peoples of the U.S.S.R. into a single and inviolable camp, which is selflessly supporting its Red Army and Red Navy.”⁶⁵ As a result of this rhetoric of an “inviolable camp” making sacrifices for the Red Army, any shortages at the front were not the failure of the Soviet system or the people but rather of identifiable individuals to which the government had entrusted the sacred task of feeding. Stalin declared that “the government allocates enough varied and nourishing foodstuffs” for the army and it was “only… a negligent, dishonest, and sometimes criminal attitude on the part of commanders” that “degraded” soldiers’ rations.⁶⁶ This tracking of failure as the result of corrupt individuals was nothing new and would remain a continuous trope of Soviet discussions of provisioning, even as systematic problems became obvious.

Breakdowns: Their Consequences and Their Culprits

The physical impact of hunger was impossible to ignore. Marshal Zhukov reportedly declared: “A full soldier is worth five hungry ones!”⁶⁷ Failures in provisioning were cited by Red Army officers as the direct causes of desertion, illness, and sometimes the breakdown of combat operations.⁶⁸ Soldiers died from digestive maladies at or on their way to the front, and night blindness due to lack of vitamins was very common.⁶⁹ In a meeting of top political personnel of the army, one officer exclaimed that when soldiers were not fed, “What kind of combat effectiveness can you expect from them?”⁷⁰ Wherever breakdowns occurred, culprits needed to be found and punished.

Stalin’s 1943 warning from the Kalinin Front noted that some commanders were “using their authority, disposing of ration stocks as if they were their personal property, illegally expending foodstuffs,” which had a disastrous effect on the army.⁷¹ Early in the war draconian laws concerning the theft of socialist property developed during collectivization were reiterated.⁷² Despite the consequences, commanders having more or less total control over resources on the ground often pilfered. As one provisioning officer told his colleagues in January 1943: “The fighter could be full. But why doesn’t he get all of his food? We came to a definite conclusion: starting from the DOP [Divisional Exchange Point] people steal, and when food gets to the kitchen, they steal there too.”73 This ubiquitous theft, while considered insignificant in comparison to graft under the old regime, included cases of illegal trade in foodstuffs as well as of officers throwing unsanctioned feasts using the soldiers’ rations; the latter problem became worse around holidays.⁷⁴ Theft by commanders was considered such a scourge that there was even talk of separating commanders from general provisioning. However, it was decided that feeding commanders separately would mean “they would just stop looking in on the troops.”⁷⁵

A few cases of theft (or scapegoating) within a unit could have a ripple effect and send men at the top and bottom of the rear area into eminent peril for treating communal property as personal property. At best, a tribunal or punishment battalion meant humiliation; at worst—death. For example, in May 1944, on the Third Belorussian Front, one Private M., a cook, was sent to a punishment battalion for two months for hiding 5.25 kilograms of meat and 4.9 kilograms of flour; a Lt. L. went before a military tribunal for the illegal use of a variety of luxury items (including sugar, meat, and fish); the head provisioning officer for their army, a Guards major general, was removed from his position for allowing these abuses under his command.⁷⁶

Theft aside, provisioning was a challenge. Under the difficult conditions of armies on the move, provisioning officers were forced to find secure storage during every advance and retreat, often in places utterly ravaged by war.⁷⁷ Incompetence could make a difficult situation catastrophic.⁷⁸ Food was left to rot or to be consumed by rats or left unguarded and stolen. A report from the Transcaucasian Front in January 1943 noted the “extreme carelessness” and “unsanitary conditions” in which “grain is stored in heaps on a dirty floor” and “four hundred tons of potatoes were ruined,” yet no one was brought to answer. Inspections frequently found both field kitchens and canteens serving military personnel (including Moscow canteens that fed the staff of the People’s Commissariat of Defense) dirty and under-supplied.⁷⁹ Vegetables were boiled without being peeled, creating muck.⁸⁰ Soldiers could be given raw food with no way to prepare it or, worst of all, simply given nothing.⁸¹

All of this spoke to a violation of the government’s obligation to its soldiers, who were quite conscious of their duties and those of the state. Wherever Soviet leadership noted that the paëk was not being received, Soviet power was quick to find the culprits and ameliorate the situation. In Stalin’s admonition to the Kalinin Front on May 31, 1943, the army was to retroactively make good what it had failed to give frontline soldiers for up to five days of foodstuffs and up to fifteen days of luxuries (tobacco, soap, vodka, etc.).⁸² These obligations took on a wider scope as the war reached its turning point, as the government promised not only to provide calories but to emphasize taste.

Improvement

By 1943 Soviet leadership demanded very high-quality rations, and standards sometimes contradicted the logic of provisioning more generally. Vil’iam Pokhlëbkin noted that the categories used by the army to apportion foodstuffs were dramatically simplified and made no appeal to variety. As a result there “came the ‘era’ of the potato, or pea, and suddenly the ‘macaroni period’ or continuously only oats or pearl barley”—whatever was on hand was whatever was going to be served.83 As the war progressed and the Red Army’s fortunes changed, these “eras” became inexcusable.⁸⁴ The army began placing greater emphasis on who was cooking. Alongside the call for better and more varied ingredients, the army sought to improve the skills of cadres doing the cooking by finding professional chefs who were already serving in the army and replacing men with women. The military press took aim at bad cooks and praised good ones, while skilled cooks received medals.⁸⁵ A special badge was created for “excellent cooks” in 1943, and intensive training courses were held in 1943 to train new (mainly female) cooks.⁸⁶ According to Pokhlëbkin, this led to a period of experimentation among military cooks that altered the face of postwar Soviet culinary traditions.⁸⁷

This spirit of innovation was not merely a phenomenon of the front line. Lend-Lease food from the United States required cooks to come up with new ways to use unfamiliar products, such as Spam, Vienna sausages, and deviled ham. In 1944 a special manual was published, translating the labels of Lend-Lease products and explaining how to prepare them.⁸⁸ Provisioning officers experimented with “vegetarian days,” specialized foods for those in hospitals, wild herbs, frozen foods, and various dishes that could be prepared in the rear and given to troops at the front. In one particularly innovative moment, a provisioning officer described how frozen meat dumplings (pel’meni) were air-dropped to troops caught in encirclement.⁸⁹

Food was rhetoric made substance. Soldiers could literally feel when the state was not holding up its end of the bargain. The government had promised to feed its soldiers and to punish those responsible for any failures in provisioning. This was a promise that the Soviet leadership intended to keep despite tremendous losses in every type of resource imaginable. As battlefield successes began to show the army’s worth and liberation gave access to resources, a new set of expectations emerged, leading to greater demands from the soldiers. Political and provisioning officers encouraged soldiers to speak honestly about how they were being fed. At a conference for propagandists and agitators in 1943, Shcherbakov declared: “We should have taught agitators to start with makhorka [soldier’s tobacco]. Is there enough of it? Have you eaten today? Every agitator—the new and old—should start with this.”90 Military psychologists discovered strong correlations between morale and being well-provisioned.⁹¹ One commander told the war correspondent Vasilii Grossman: “The worse the front, the more food reminds you of peacetime.”⁹² In conversation with soldiers, agitators and provisioning and political officers learned how important hot food, tea, spices, and a smoke could be to men risking their lives in defense of the Soviet Union.⁹³

Pots and Spoons: Eating and Drinking in the Red Army

Conditions and Improvisation

Red Army soldiers were supposed to receive hot, fresh food. Mikhail Loginov, a platoon commander on the Kalinin Front, recalled how after the ten-kilometer round trip to the field kitchen, his soldiers brought back “cold soup, cold kasha, and cold tea. There is nothing and nowhere to heat up the food—neither dry spirits, nor firewood, and anyway, to start a fire at the front is forbidden. The enemy would notice and immediately bombard us.”⁹⁴ Hot food was often an unrealizable goal, as field kitchens could service three hundred or more men scattered over a wide front at each meal. Posting kitchens close to the front endangered them with bombardment and capture. In the chaos of the front, some field kitchens ended up delivering themselves to the enemy.⁹⁵ Soldiers carrying food could be killed, thermoses destroyed.⁹⁶ During successful offensives, troops could outrun their provisioning services and were sometimes forced to live on what they could capture.⁹⁷

Improvisation was a way of life. Making do was a necessity in a world without chairs, tables, napkins, and other trappings of civility. Tvardovskii’s hero Tërkin recalls how soldiers’ new habits are inexcusable in “heaven”— the civilian world as exemplified by a rear-area hospital, where “you can’t eat off your knee/Only from the table” nor “mangle bread with a bayonet.”⁹⁸ Eating at the front was something that was done wherever the food found its consumers—in bunkers, mud-filled trenches, forests, bombed-out cities, and along dusty roads.⁹⁹

The calculations done in the rear concentrated on the body, not the psyche. Even when food was ample, soldiers suffered from nerves and exhaustion. The milieu could be inimical to eating, as Loginov recalled: “From no man’s land a little wind blows, bringing the slightly sweet smell of corpses, filling the trench. We have trouble breathing, and a few get nauseous and throw up. Dinner is brought up in thermoses, but I can’t look at the meat or kasha. I give my portion to the soldiers, and myself have only bread and cold tea from my canteen.”100 Conversely, animal carrion near the trenches could become food for soldiers.

FIGURE 3.1 Red Army soldiers eating, Second Baltic Front, 1944. Note the variety of mess tins they are eating from and the shovels hanging off their belts. RGAKFD 0-291527 (V. P. Grebnev).

During the first two years of the war, when the situation with meat in the army was critical, soldiers and resourceful cooks found a solution on the battlefield.¹⁰¹ Lesin recalled how in April 1942, horsemeat became the main source of food for him and his comrades, and a variety of sources show this was common practice. At first this idea disgusted him, as something alien to his culture: “To him, a Tatar, makhan [horsemeat] is the same as pork to a Russian. We all have a taste for horsemeat now.”¹⁰² The military translator Irina Dunaevskaia initially described soldiers mocking Kazakhs who ate horse but later noted that she and a comrade were “lucky” when a shell killed a horse, and they ate “makhan (there is no other way to refer to this at the front than by this Tatar word).”¹⁰³ Less fresh horse carrion (propastina), was, of course, of questionable quality, but also common.¹⁰⁴ Some units earned a bad reputation for their love of horseflesh. A report filed after an inspection of the Fiftieth Army (on the Kalinin Front, where F. S. Saushin, Lesin, and Loginov served) noted that a certain Colonel Samsonov admitted his division had eaten 175 of its horses, leading others to snicker “be careful; don’t leave your horses standing around, because the ‘Samsons’ will eat them right away.”¹⁰⁵ Horses were not part of rations, and their consumption could be both demoralizing and counterproductive. But in the darkest days of hunger, they soon found their way into the soldier’s pot as an expedient way to make up for what the state could not provide.

Troops sometimes resorted to theft as a means of ensuring survival.¹⁰⁶ Theft, or the perception of thievery, could destroy bonds within a unit, so a fair distribution of rations was key to morale. At the front, exact measurements of food proved impractical. Some starshiny found their own way out of this, using magazines and discs from weapons as ersatz weights, a practice condemned by Krasnaia zvezda.¹⁰⁷ However, the most common arrangement to ensure fairness in the distribution of rations was a system found in many armies throughout history, in which rations were doled out into piles and “one of the soldiers turns to the side, and the one who divided the rations points to a portion and asks, ‘Whose?’ The soldier turned to the side names any name.”¹⁰⁸ Such a system ensured that any inequality in rations was pure chance. This maintained a sense of fairness at the lowest level of ration distribution and kept disputes over what was probably the most valuable commodity to a minimum.

Eating from the Same Pot

Eating in the Red Army was a collective activity that could strengthen bonds between the diverse people in the ranks. It was a time of rest, when soldiers took stock of their situation, remembered home, got to know each other, and replenished their physical strength. While soldiers seemed to always want more to eat, situations where food was ample were not necessarily occasions for celebration. The strict ratios of products to soldiers proved difficult to fulfill as casualties mounted on the front. The head of provisioning of the First Belorussian Front, N. A. Antipenko, admitted that, since the calculation and reporting of casualties always came with delay and the “higher authorities continue to send food for the entire unit… a soldier in the course of an offensive received unlimited food.”109 Moments of rest and feeding underlined the losses that a unit had suffered. A passage from an autobiographical novel by Grigorii Baklanov captures this moment eloquently: “Only after he swallowed did he look at what he was eating. In his mess pot was thick, yellow pea soup. And with this spoon, with his eyes closed, he mentally held a funerary feast for those who today were no longer with them. They were still here, all the same; they could stumble into the kitchen at any moment, sit in the sun.”¹¹⁰ Eating was when you realized that you were alive, a visceral moment that separated the living and the dead.¹¹¹ As a result, army food could evoke strong emotions and potent memories, and, as we see from this quotation, could create the sense that those who had fallen were near.

A sense of communality was supported by the most quotidian details of provisioning. Soldiers were supposed to receive two dishes, yet they were issued only one mess pot, and given that shortage was a general rule, there were often fewer pots than soldiers.¹¹² Red Army pots came in two styles. One was a copy of the German mess tin issued in both world wars, which was a kidney-shaped aluminum pot with a bail-like handle and a shallow top that doubled as a cup.¹¹³ The other was a simple round pot of varying depths with a bail handle but no top. The mess pot was not entirely the soldier’s and not entirely the government’s, much like the food that was consumed in it. The pot was issued by the army, but it was one of the few items of a soldier’s kit that seemed to belong specifically to him or her. It was not uncommon for soldiers to decorate their pots with their name, a place where they had served, or the name of a friend or random acquaintance. Lev Slëzkin carved the names of two Estonian women he met before the war onto the side of his pot “in memory of a pleasant, romantic meeting.”¹¹⁴ By carving names, initials, places, and dates into government-issued items, soldiers turned an anonymous piece of metal into a personal item that recorded parts of their biography.

Mess pots served not only for consuming and occasionally preparing food. One female soldier recalled, “Mess tins! We had them for food, to wash our clothes in, to wash up ourselves with—everywhere mess tins!”115 They served as desks.¹¹⁶ Many soldiers lacking vitamin A suffered from night blindness, which created serious problems on long marches under the cover of darkness. In this case, banging a rod on the mess pot of the man in front enabled the blinded soldier to complete night marches.¹¹⁷ A soldier’s mess pot was something like a room in a portable home, serving as dining room and sometimes as kitchen and shower. However, as all activities in the army took place in the company of others, soldiers shared their pots with their comrades.

When food was doled out to soldiers, often one pot was filled with soup, the other with kasha.¹¹⁸ Soldiers would eat in pairs, as Gabriel Temkin remembers: “We ate from one kotelok (mess tin), using approximately the same size wooden spoons. We would eat by turns, I a spoonful and then he a spoonful, slowly, as becoming among comrades. Having finished the soup or kasha, we would lick clean our personal spoons and put them back in place, where they were customarily kept—behind the top of the right or left boot.” Such an arrangement helped to build a sense of comradeship, as soldiers of different ages and ethnicities found themselves eating from the same pot. The spoons that they dipped carried special meaning, as Temkin noted: “Frontline soldiers would sometimes, in panicky retreats, throw away their heavy rifles but never their spoons.”¹¹⁹

Virtually nothing that soldiers carried belonged to them. Their clothes were the property of the government. When they went to a bathhouse to wash up, they were not guaranteed to get their own set of underwear back. Their weapons belonged to the army, as did the food they ate. However, the spoon was something that the individual soldier owned. Draft notices instructed inductees to bring a spoon, cup, towel, and change of underwear.¹²⁰ Given that the towel and underwear would soon be worn out, the spoon and cup were among the few items from the civilian world that soldiers would carry throughout their service. Spoons were frequently individualized with initials and artwork and are often the only way to identify soldiers whose remains are found today. The spoon could be wooden or metal, a traditional Russian triangular spoon or an oval soupspoon. German and Finnish folding spoons were also popular, as they were easily carried and their handles doubled as forks. Some soldiers made their own spoons out of scrap found on the battlefield, such as downed planes.¹²¹ In one case, an officer found craftsmen from among his soldiers, took them from the front line, and put them to work carving spoons for soldiers in need.122 Spoons were a frequent item in government supply orders throughout the war: in the third quarter of 1942 alone, 1.9 million wooden spoons were ordered.¹²³

The spoon was the only utensil soldiers were expected to have—all of their food was designed to be eaten either with a spoon or bare hands. The spoon became a mark of a real soldier. Vera Malakhova, a frontline surgeon, recalled an embarrassing moment near Odessa. While joining a group of soldiers sitting down to a meal, she realized that she lacked something the men around her all possessed: “‘What sort of a blankety-blank are you? Just what sort of soldier are you? Why don’t you have a spoon?’”¹²⁴ Even dry rations could not be consumed without a spoon. A soldier reduced to a minimum carried a spoon and a rifle. The soldier’s spoon separated the military and civilian worlds. In a letter home in 1939, Lev Slëzkin describes how soldiers confronted silverware in a café “like troglodytes, looking with tender emotion at knives and forks (in the barracks we eat only with spoons).”¹²⁵ Spoons were the implement of individual consumption and a deeply prized, rare piece of personal property. Yet every aspect of the soldier’s rations could be treated as if it were personal property.

Currencies, Rituals, Substitutes, and Valuables

Food became a tradable commodity under conditions of extreme scarcity. People receiving rations throughout the country were often willing to part with durable goods (such as clothing and jewelry) for consumables (such as bread, meat, and vodka). As one war correspondent recorded in his diary in January 1943, “The modern form of payment is vodka and bread.”¹²⁶ Boris Slutskii recalled: “In the trenches there was a lively exchange business! Tobacco for sugar, a portion of vodka for two portions of sugar. The prosecutor struggled with this barter in vain.”¹²⁷ Some soldiers traded frontline trophies for food. These exchanges both highlighted the rituals of consumption that took place in the army and allowed those who did not drink or smoke to participate in or profit from them by either exchanging or giving away their portions of tobacco and alcohol.¹²⁸ These coveted items were not only potential commodities but also consumables that were used collectively.

“Let’s smoke one, comrade!” was the chorus of a popular wartime song.¹²⁹ Tobacco was considered to be so important that the provisioning officer of the Kalinin Front was flown to Moscow to procure it in the spring of 1944 and ordered not to return without makhorka. He did this despite orders not to send delegations from the front to beg from manufacturers.¹³⁰ Tobacco was such an integral part of military culture that the state was dedicated to providing its soldiers with smokes despite a union-wide reduction to 25 percent of prewar production.131 Smoking, a communal activity experienced as a different form of time, brought soldiers together in moments of rest and was often accompanied by sugary black tea.¹³²

Tea—which, according to a nutrition textbook from 1940, was “almost without nutritional value”—was to be given to soldiers hot, twice a day, and manuals reminded soldiers that it was preferable to water.¹³³ Some aspects of the soldier’s ration were clearly aimed at psychological rather than nutritional benefits and were invested with important social meaning. Tobacco and tea were useful stimulants; the latter, served warm, could save those dying of frostbite. Tea was a particularly good delivery system for sugar and quick calories. Both caffeine and nicotine could enliven people psychologically numbed by lack of sleep, endless manual labor, fighting, and long marches. They also leant themselves to ritualized, habitual use.¹³⁴ Vodka, a depressant, could calm the nerves of soldiers who had seen ghastly sights.

Vodka had only recently returned to the Red Army soldier’s ration, the experience of the Finnish War having shown its value in staving off frostbite and death by exposure. Beginning with the Finnish campaign, one hundred grams (3.4 fl. oz.) of vodka were issued in winter. In the course of the war, vodka was used as a reward for frontline service and became a necessary part of revolutionary holidays. The amount soldiers were given and conditions under which soldiers earned their vodka ration fluctuated, but it was clear that vodka was seen as a privilege earned by those actively defending the Motherland. Soldiers engaged in offensive operations were always allotted a vodka ration, sometimes a double ration.¹³⁵

The army’s approach to rationing vodka rested on the notion that it could manage the delicate balance between calming nerves and inducing drunkenness. Soldiers, however, disposed of their rations in various ways and often found means to acquire more than their allotment. Some female soldiers reported never having received a vodka ration; others that they gave theirs away.¹³⁶ Many Muslim soldiers gave their vodka to their comrades.¹³⁷ Trade and gift giving disrupted the army’s attempt to manage soldiers’ use of vodka, as did theft by officers, and the lag between tallying losses and computing the quantity of necessary supplies. Commanders wrote home to their local representatives begging not to send alcohol in care packages.¹³⁸ Man sur Abdulin recalled the catastrophe that ensued when Red Army soldiers discovered an intact distillery abandoned by the Germans in retreat: many “tied one on,” and when thirty enemy tanks appeared, drunken soldiers who had fought bravely elsewhere met a ghastly end.139 Access to alcohol only increased as the war continued, as Red Army men gained access to the wine cellars of East Central Europe.¹⁴⁰ Once this happened, it became increasingly difficult to control consumption habits.¹⁴¹

Drink offered one of the few escapes for men under severe stress but could lead to disaster. The ambiguities of vodka as doled out by the state had a peculiar effect, according to Pokhlёbkin: “By 1945 the use of vodka, which had been low-class and forbidden, suddenly became very prestigious among the mid-level leadership… and refusing your allotted portion of spirits was already understood as an element of opposition and disloyalty.” Who, after all, would refuse what the government had provided?¹⁴²

While Red Army soldiers were provided with vodka, they were on their own when it came to finding water. Soldiers were issued half-liter canteens and were supposed to bring their own mugs upon mobilization. The canteen, however, often suffered from several shortcomings. To economize on precious aluminum, used for both canteens and airplanes, the army began manufacturing glass canteens. A report concerning equipment in the first three months of the war concluded: “The canteen in and of itself is convenient, but the glass ones are very fragile, and the aluminum ones are too few and expensive to make.”¹⁴³ Glass canteens continued to be manufactured as a stopgap measure. Even though metal canteens were supposed to become the norm, over four million glass ones were ordered in the third quarter of 1942 and five million in the third quarter of 1943.¹⁴⁴

The army published norms for hydration as well as recommendations on what, when, and how to drink.¹⁴⁵ It was estimated that every soldier consumed 10–15 liters of water a day, drinking 3–4.5 liters and using the rest for food preparation and cleaning. Medics were responsible for testing and marking all water sources.¹⁴⁶ Soldiers were officially tasked with finding or digging their own wells and building their own filtration systems.¹⁴⁷ The army discouraged soldiers from drinking water, as there was no way to ensure that water found would not prove harmful or lethal, particularly given the presence of the dead and tendency of retreating Germans to poison wells. Much of the time, soldiers just took their chances, drinking from ditches or wherever else they could find water.¹⁴⁸ This was another aspect of the importance of tea: providing tea ensured that soldiers would be drinking water that had at least been boiled.¹⁴⁹

Water was scavenged but not trusted, preferably converted into something else. Nonetheless, this nonissue liquid became a way to dull hunger, as Boris Slutskii recalled: “Not just Kazakhs and Uzbeks, but heads and commanders of MPVO [Local Anti-Aircraft Defense] in the artillery regiment added many liters of water to their kasha—so that at least something would slosh around in the belly.”150 Inspection reports also mention this practice with alarm, as it was assumed that diluted food would not be properly digested.¹⁵¹ Despite the army’s attempt to control completely what soldiers consumed, at times what they ate and drank was entirely beyond its control and often a reaction to failed attempts at provisioning. Water all too often took the place of a soldier’s “daily bread.”

Bread was the most important component of a soldier’s ration. A regiment (at full strength just over three thousand soldiers) would eat 2.6 tons of bread a day. Whether freshly baked in mobile field ovens or dried for long-term storage, bread made up half of the calories in a soldier’s ration, was officially considered “the primary foodstuff,” and, at 500–800 grams (17.6–28.2 oz.), was the largest portion of rations by weight. The wide gap in bread rations was one of the most palpable examples of the hierarchy of foodstuffs between the front and rear. In Russia bread occupied a psychological and cultural space symbolizing sustenance writ large.¹⁵²

At the front, soldiers’ obsession with bread could be extreme. Saushin, a provisioning officer on the Volkhov Front, recalled two instances of the close relationship soldiers had to bread. The first came from the dark times of 1941, when, after a prolonged period of being cut off from supply, soldiers received their rations. While crouching under fire, one man “held his rifle in one hand and a half loaf of bread in the other. It was uncomfortable for him to bend to the earth, and when necessary lie down and rise again… ‘Drop the loaf, you’ll get yourself killed!’ I yelled to him… The Red Army man stopped for a second, and with surprise and fear looked at me. ‘But it is bread! Don’t you understand Comrade Commissar, bread’… It seems that for him it was easier to take death” than part with his bread.¹⁵³ During an inspection, General Shcherbakov was disturbed by how thinly the men sliced their bread. A soldier responded: “The thinner you slice it, the more there is. You see it’s worth its weight in gold.”¹⁵⁴ On the starving Leningrad Front, there was reluctance to give the men their bread ration in one lump sum—they ate it immediately.¹⁵⁵ Gabriel Temkin recalled that the young soldiers in his platoon were glad to be in the army as it was the place one could find ample bread. They would even save it for last as “bread is good by itself.”¹⁵⁶

Discontent and Subversion

Soldiers often complained about their paëk. The soldier with whom Temkin shared his mess tin grumbled: “Two things… bread and tobacco, should be distributed according to needs, and not according to the silly equal stomach principle. Take bread, the food most important for a human being. Is it fair to give somebody, a big guy like myself and a small guy like you—no offense, Gavriusha—the same daily paëk?”157 Appetites, metabolisms, and differences in body mass were outside the scope of rationing, to the resentment of some.

Station was a key factor determining what soldiers received. The paëk did not always seem fair, and interest in how comrades of other ranks or branches of service ate speaks to the moral economy of provisioning. Boris Slutskii recalled how enlisted men envied the rations received by officers.¹⁵⁸ Resentment targeted not only those of higher rank but also elite branches of service. When the army was approaching Berlin, a soldier in Rakhimzhan Koshkarbaev’s platoon described pilots as “devilish aristocrats” for receiving cookies and chocolate while infantrymen had “forgotten the taste of sugar”: “I am thinking about the future, Commander. When the war ends, and they start to write its history, some good-for-nothing descendant will put it into their head to define the extent of participation of a branch of service in battles by how well they were fed. And it turns out that the poor infantry didn’t play any role. Just try and prove later that you trudged through half of Europe with your stomach.”¹⁵⁹ Was a pilot risking his life any more than an infantryman? Why did a “devilish aristocrat” deserve more and better rations than cannon fodder? Even if he needed more calories to fulfill his task, why did a pilot get them in the form of scarce cookies and chocolate? The fact that the government clearly used calories and scarce goods as a measure of worth made these questions all the more sensitive.

Hierarchies and sympathies could create a situation that reinterpreted paëk. Machine gunners often received extra vodka and rations, commanders could send newly arrived soldiers to the field kitchen to fatten up and might share their additional officer’s rations with an old friend under their command.¹⁶⁰ Commanders learned to send the soldier who knew how to flirt with the (female) cook to get their rations, as she would pour them a thicker soup.¹⁶¹ Interaction between the sexes was just one of many ways in which understandings of food as something more than calories interfered with the state’s mission of nutrition.

Early in the war soldiers began to challenge the calorie principle of provisioning. As the war dragged on and they were forced to live through the above-mentioned “eras” of one or another foodstuff that had been stockpiled, they complained. Pearl barley porridge was known as shrapnel’, and one prosecutor mused that the common expression denigrating female soldiers who lived with commanders, PPZh, was allowed to enter into common usage because it distracted soldiers from a more demoralizing phenomenon—PPS, postoiannyi perlovyi sup or “eternal pearl barley soup.”162

National Difference and Military Cuisine

Strong reactions to rations occasionally arose from the way in which provisioning disregarded the cultural traditions of some of the men in the ranks. The war was the first time large numbers of several traditionally Muslim nationalities were mobilized into the Red Army. Culinary practices within the army often varied dramatically from what these men had eaten in the prewar world. The meeting of different nationalities at the front could lead to an expansion of culinary horizons, as Uzbeks ate borsch for the first time and Ukrainians ate plov (pilaf). Pokhlëbkin claims that the war introduced many people from east of the Ural Mountains to the potato, which Lizzie Collingham declared “became the food of the Second World War.”¹⁶³ One Azerbaijani draftee (who would die defending the Brest Fortress) complained on the eve of the war that he couldn’t eat the local food.¹⁶⁴ Nikolai Inozemtsev made several references to the chebureki (fried pies common in the North Caucasus and Crimea) that his comrade Akhmetov made on special occasions.¹⁶⁵ An article from the newspaper Za Rodinu describes how a Yakut, Ukrainian, and Russian all prepared national dishes for their comrades—variations of dumplings.¹⁶⁶

Consuming rations could bring together or alienate soldiers from different ethnic backgrounds. The Red Army’s Political Department was particularly disturbed when some soldiers refused to share tobacco with anyone other than their co-ethnics, interpreting this act as a threat to the “Friendship of the Peoples,” the rhetoric of harmonious coexistence among the many nationalities of the Soviet Union, which served as a cornerstone of the Soviet system.¹⁶⁷ Top political officers also discussed the importance of tea for some nationalities in 1943: “Things are bad with hot tea. This question is particularly sharp in non-Russian units. Uzbeks and Kazakhs especially love tea. If one of them gets a medal they all go to drink tea with him. But here we hit the question—where can they drink tea?”¹⁶⁸ Creative commanders provided these spaces. Some soldiers greeted reinforcements from Central Asia by carving out a chaikhana [tea house], getting some pialy [Central Asian-style teacups], and cooking plov with horsemeat for them.¹⁶⁹ Others resented the refusal of many Muslim soldiers to eat pork.¹⁷⁰ Given, the ubiquity of hunger, such behavior could seem criminal. In the army everyone was forced to eat things that they found less than appetizing, but for some, the food available challenged fundamental conceptions of themselves, which could occasionally lead to choosing hunger over betraying deeply held beliefs or to eating unfamiliar foods that their bodies did not always accept.171 Even as provisioning improved and the army began to emphasize variety and such amenities as tea houses, offering an alternative to pork was not something that interested the government. The war’s deprivations instead “taught” people how to eat anything.¹⁷²

From Hunger to Feast

By mid-1943 the organization of the rear area became noticeably better and the resources available to the army richer. Aleksandr Lesin’s diary is marked by constant references to food and hunger in 1942, but by the summer of 1943 food is not what is on his mind and is rarely mentioned through the end of the war. Rafgat Akhtiamov, who had written his parents several times in 1941 and 1942 asking them to send food, wrote home in 1943: “Don’t worry about me. Now all is well with food.”¹⁷³ When soldiers mention food in interviews and memoirs, 1943 is generally remembered as the year in which quality and quantity noticeably improved.¹⁷⁴ This trend continued, raising expectations among the troops. An artillery officer interviewed in March 1945 boasted: “We are fed very well, as Guardsmen… People have become so finicky that they say: ‘I don’t want a pig, I want suckling pigs, goose.’ There is enough of it there. People have gotten so fat that they are like peaches.”¹⁷⁵ Vasilii Grossman noted the same trend: “Among the infantry rosy, plump faces have appeared, which never happened before.”¹⁷⁶

With this new abundance came new responsibilities. Lesin called for the public execution of anyone stealing from the local population in Latvia, specifically citing the ample food available.¹⁷⁷ By the end of the war food had become sufficient enough that it could be wasted, as Boris Slutskii recalled: “all around the infantry overran kitchens, knocking mountains of kasha into the dirty snow—even though in the kasha they heaped 600 grams of meat per person, and not 37.5 grams of noble egg powder.”¹⁷⁸

Mobilizing Calories

The way that belligerents imagined the war could not be divorced from resources, especially food. Nazi planning imagined the Soviet Union as a space of extraction; occupation policies turned these imaginings into reality. Placing food near the center of its concerns, the Soviet government reexamined its relationship with its citizens, categorizing those defending it on a higher plane under conditions in which the possibility of starvation was very real. The implementation of this relationship created hierarchies, which stated in quantifiable terms whose life the state valued above others. While many aspects of provisioning would be reconsidered, these hierarchies remained intact and were indeed refined in the course of the war as a variety of elite formations and specializations saw privileges added to their status. In addition to creating new hierarchies, invested with real benefits, this system had the potential to efface identities that had existed before being drafted into the army.

The army as an institution was not interested in accommodating the culinary norms of the variety of peoples who composed its ranks; it was concerned with the much more vital function of keeping people fed. Muslims were fed pork alongside atheists and Orthodox Christians. In dire straits, Russians learned to eat horse from their Turkic comrades. If the cook of a unit happened to be Uzbek, men from European Russia might find themselves eating plov (likely with horse) for the first time. The army became a place where large numbers of men and women from a variety of ethnic and regional backgrounds came to share something like a common culinary culture. Despite the fact that provisioning was so localized, everyone in the army was likely to have received similar portions of borsch and kasha. Everyone experienced the same periods of feast and famine, shared while dipping their spoons into the government’s pot. They would use similar tactics to survive when the army failed to provide and use their rations in ways that suited them. It would be nearly impossible for these soldiers not to appreciate how much better their rations were than those of their families in the rear. The shared experience of suffering and improvisation, followed by feasting and victory, is part of what made the Great Patriotic War such a central event in Soviet history. Food could unite and divide men and women in the ranks.

By the war’s end, the abundance enjoyed by the army came from a much better-organized apparatus with access to more and more resources.179 Everywhere it went, the army established a monopoly on foodstuffs, and in areas ravaged by war the army was often the only source of provisions for both civilian and military personnel. In Berlin, in the course of May 1945, the Red Army was feeding two million of its own soldiers and four million German civilians.¹⁸⁰ The army fed entire enemy cities, incorporating their populations into military provisioning via ration cards.¹⁸¹ Once the provisioning system was fully functioning, the mutual obligations implied by the word paëk came to encompass former enemy civilians and prisoners of war. In return for recognizing the Soviet Union’s monopoly of sovereignty, former enemies were provided with sustenance.182 The army had come a long way from the dark days of 1941–1942, and its ability to provide for an organization of such scale moving so quickly was truly phenomenal. Of course, these calories were not given for free but as fuel for deadly and exhausting work.