Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (56 page)

FEEDING THE CITIES

In the years leading up to the Second World War the people of the Soviet Union had faced one disruption to normal life after another. The First World War, the Bolshevik revolution, and the civil war had cost about 15 million lives and steadily lowered the standard of living.
⁴⁷
One Russian recalled how ‘from the time of the Revolution in 1917 … the people have become more reticent, sullen … Every person tries to protect his own interests. For him, his food is everything.’
⁴⁸
By 1920 Russian workers were eating about half the amount of food they had consumed just before the First World War.
⁴⁹
Then, at the end of the 1920s, private enterprise was outlawed by the communist regime and almost overnight the state became the only distributor of goods. The result was the intensification of shortages and the growth of queues and waiting lists for everything from food and clothes to housing and medical care. Government stores were often bare and the Russian diet became yet more limited, with poor-quality foods such as horsemeat and ersatz tea made of apples the norm.
⁵⁰

The 1930s were worse than the 1920s. The reverberations of poor harvests, collectivization and famine in the countryside were felt in the cities as refugees from rural hunger flooded into the urban areas. Urban life was characterized by intensely overcrowded housing, a shaky electricity and fuel supply and a lack of the most basic essentials such as shoes, clothes, pots and pans. Life developed into a constant struggle to acquire basic necessities and people would spend hours standing in queues hoping to buy tiny quantities of substandard food.
⁵¹
By 1933 Soviets were consuming one-fifth of the amount of meat and fish that they would have eaten around 1900.
⁵²
The promise that after the class struggle communism would deliver a far higher quality of life slipped ever further into the future. But in the end the deprivations of these years stood the Soviet population in good stead, inuring them to the much worse conditions which prevailed during the Second World War.

In the first year of the war, industry disintegrated into a state of
disarray similar to that of the Red Army. Much of the country’s industrial capacity was in the west. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1941, 1,500 factories were taken apart and, along with many of the workers, were sent on a laborious journey to the Urals, central Asia and Siberia, where they were reassembled.
⁵³
On arrival in the new location, parts were often missing, tools and equipment scarce, power supplies low and the labour force was usually below full strength. There was often nowhere for the workers to live, and at one tank factory in the east more than 8,000 women workers lived in earth bunkers, dug into the ground. Despite the confusion and hardship the saving of these plants was a major feat which contributed a great deal to Soviet industrial survival.
⁵⁴
Nevertheless, the Wehrmacht overran factories with a total annual capacity of 13 million shells. Only one-third of the target number of shells was produced in 1941 and tank production could not keep up with the heavy losses at the front.
⁵⁵
Just to sustain the most basic defence against the German onslaught, let alone attempt to mount a counter-offensive, the Soviets had to pour all their energies into producing arms.

In the drive to supply the troops with weapons,
everything
else fell by the wayside. Even subsidiary industries such as iron and steel, coal and oil were neglected. In 1941–42 the civilian sector of the economy virtually collapsed. The clothing industry produced only half its normal quantity of goods, but most of these were uniforms and woollens for the military. Ordinary people found it almost impossible to get hold of new clothes or shoes.
⁵⁶
The transport systems in the towns and cities began to falter for lack of fuel and people were forced to walk to work. Electricity was reserved for the armaments factories, and ordinary homes were only supplied for a few hours at a time. There was a severe shortage of fuel for heating or cooking; there were no new pots and pans to replace those that were worn out; there was virtually no soap for washing of clothes or bodies. In these extreme circumstances it became increasingly difficult to sustain even the most basic daily life.
⁵⁷

Victor Kravchenko, an industrial party official who was to defect to the United States at the end of the war, described how in the first winter, as the Germans approached Moscow, the city, ‘like an individual … suffer[ed] a nervous breakdown … The blacked-out capital to which I returned was hungry, frostbitten, pockmarked by enemy bombs. It
seemed broken in spirit and almost too weary to despair. Its people … dragged themselves from frozen homes to labour long hours in underheated plants and offices … the official rations were barely enough to sustain life but the shops could rarely meet these pitiful food requirements.’
⁵⁸
The physicist Andrei Sakharov recalled that among all the privations of daily life, ‘the worst thing was the continual hunger’.
⁵⁹
Irene Rush, an Australian teacher of English who lived through the war in Moscow, described how the ‘food pinch’ began in August with the issue of milk cards for children. ‘Very little sugar was being given on the ration cards. There was no salt; and potatoes were getting scarce. Everyone was on the trail to buy a little extra food at the “commercial” shops, especially oil or clarified butter … Word would fly round: “there’s oil at such and such shop”, and people would seize their billies and hasten there, joining a queue that already contained perhaps hundreds of people … On entering the shop after hours of waiting people became more tense and silent: all feared to hear the dreaded words: “The oil (or what have you) is finished, go home citizens!”’
⁶⁰
By the end of the winter every dog, cat and crow in the capital had been caught and eaten.

Irene Rush and her friends scraped by on a peculiar assortment of substitute foods. A friend made up food packages of throat pastilles, cough drops and ‘some horrible “sea cabbage” that looked like grey-green chaff and tasted like concentrated iodine’ from the chemist shops.
⁶¹
There was no longer any point in queuing up for cooking oil, and they took to frying their food in Vaseline or paraffin oil. Doctors warned that the old and the young were beginning to display the signs of serious vitamin deficiency.
⁶²
‘Hunger and cold became more of a threat than the Luftwaffe.’ The Muscovites sat huddled in their apartments, wrapped up in coats and shawls, even gloves, in total darkness behind their blacked-out windows. ‘Life was difficult and joyless.’
⁶³
The bodies of people who had collapsed from hunger began to appear on the streets.

This breakdown in ordinary civilian life was replicated ‘in a small-scale episodic, yet widespread fashion … across the whole country through all the years of war’.
⁶⁴
When the power supply broke down, the lights went out and the factories and shops closed, people retreated to their freezing apartments. Exhausted by long walks to work, the
awful struggle to wash and cook, far too little poor-quality and innutritious food, they despairingly chopped up and burned their furniture and books to keep warm, and many died quietly of hunger. These sporadic and dispersed crises will have accounted for a large number of the Soviet civilian deaths from starvation which went almost un-noticed and unrecorded.
⁶⁵
The collapse of ordinary civilian life was a serious threat to the war effort. It was essential to keep the metal industries running, which supplied the munitions factories with their raw materials. When fuel was in short supply and the transport sector collapsed, workers struggled to get to their factories. Most crucially of all, it was vital to supply the food rations which kept the workers in the munitions factories alive. Without a civilian economy the entire war industry was in danger of grinding to a halt.
⁶⁶

Before the war almost the entire calorific intake of the Soviet urban population was supplied by state-run shops. When the Germans attacked in June 1941 the communist system of central planning could not cope with the demands of prioritizing
everything
at once and food officials concentrated on feeding the army.
⁶⁷
A semblance of a rationing system was adopted but the idea that this was in order to distribute shortages equally across the population was meaningless in the Soviet context. Workers and townspeople were provided with ration cards but the entitlements stated on them represented a set of aspirations. If they had received the amounts of bread, flour, cereals, sugar, fats, meat and fish allocated by their ration cards, Soviets would have been eating about a half of the caloric consumption of American citizens.
⁶⁸
Even this would have been a meagre diet for people engaged in hard manual labour, living and working in cold houses and factories (keeping warm uses up calories), with a daily life which included many arduous household tasks. But the system could rarely provide the foods on the card in anything like the stated quantities. A Ukrainian military cartographer, who escaped from the Soviet Union after the war, told his American interviewer in the 1950s a joke which summed up the Soviet wartime experience of food. ‘One Muscovite meets another and asks, “How are you doing?” “Like Lenin.” “What do you mean like Lenin?” “That is simple: they have not buried me, but they are not giving me anything to eat.”’
⁶⁹

Nevertheless, disillusion with the government did not set in to the same extent as it had done during the First World War. People’s faith in the government was sustained by the fact that Stalin’s regime made it clear that it was committed to feeding the cities even at the expense of the countryside.
⁷⁰
The extreme food shortages were not caused by the fact that the peasants were being allowed to hoard stores of food, but because there simply was not enough food. The only item on the ration card which the state did guarantee to provide was bread. It was poor quality and black, made with inferior grains, but four-fifths of the calories and proteins that people obtained from their rations came from this bread. After the Red Army, industrial workers received priority in terms of food supply, and the greatest advantage they had over other citizens was their entitlement to a larger ration of bread. Those working in the heaviest industries received four or five times as much as those at the bottom of the scale.
⁷¹
In Rostov the women working in heavy industrial factories were there because the work entitled them to a ‘first- or second-category food ration card, that is to say eight hundred or six hundred grams of bread’.
⁷²
One former worker recalled, ‘[I did] not underestimate the six hundred grams of bread that came with my job.’
⁷³

By the end of the war, women made up just over half the heavy industrial workforce, and 80 per cent of the workers in light industry.
⁷⁴
Alongside the women, worked many young boys and teenagers. Agrippina Mikhailovna Khromova, who worked as a lathe turner in an electromechanical plant in Moscow, recalled that as the men were called up to the front, ‘schoolboys and teenagers arrived at the plant. I worked as a machinist and instructed these boys and girls. You know, they couldn’t even reach the machines!’
⁷⁵
Teenagers were drawn to war work by the food. Once they reached the age of twelve, adolescents lost the extra rations they had received as children and were reclassified as dependants. This group received the lowest rations despite the fact that they required a highly calorific diet in order to grow. Indeed, they were at an extremely high risk of starving to death if they tried to survive on a dependant’s ration. In Leningrad a fifteen-year-old machine operator remarked: ‘It is no secret that … boys tried every means possible to get into the factory, because at the factory canteen you could get three bowls of hot yeast soup and a bottle of soya milk
in exchange for a ration coupon for 12 and a half grams of groats.’
⁷⁶
Throughout the country teenagers sought out factory work as a survival strategy.

If their higher bread ration was a blessing, it was also held over workers’ heads as a threat. Absenteeism could be punished by the withdrawal of a proportion of the ration. Manual workers could lose as much as a quarter of their daily bread, an office worker one-fifth. Since ration bread was virtually the only source of protein and energy, this was a real incentive not to break the rules.
⁷⁷
Andrei Sakharov, having graduated from university in the autumn of 1942, was sent to work in a cartridge factory in Ulyanovsk. He described the working conditions for the women at his factory: ‘They sat at the deafening machines hour after hour, in huge, dimly lit rooms, hunched over and perched cross-legged on their stools to keep their wooden shoes off the cold floor, which was flooded with water and lubricants. Their faces were hidden by kerchiefs but when I caught a glimpse of them, I could see that they were lifeless, drained by fatigue.’ Many of the women from the countryside had left children behind at home and worried about them but it was impossible to get leave to visit them and if they went absent they risked five years in a labour camp. ‘The only escape was to get pregnant.’
⁷⁸