Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (58 page)

By 1943 the supplementary industries – producing coal, steel and other raw materials as well as power – and the railways, were no longer lurching from crisis to crisis and had recovered to some extent.
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The civilian economy was running again in most places, even if at a low ebb. Breakdowns continued to occur but in isolation. The likelihood of complete collapse across the entire nation was no longer imminent. Soviet central planning eventually proved itself amazingly effective in organizing the industrial economy but it remained entirely inadequate when it came to feeding the general population.
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In 1942 the communist government, which before the war had tried to take responsibility for every crumb of food eaten by the urban population, now openly changed its tactics and devolved responsibility
for finding food on to the individual. President Mikhail Kalinin told the Soviet people, ‘if you wish to take part in the victory over the German fascist invaders, then you must plant as many potatoes as possible’.
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In Britain digging for victory provided people with supplementary vitamins and variety in the diet, whereas in the Soviet Union it made a real difference to people’s chances of survival. Margaret Wettlin, an American married to a Russian theatre director, recalled that it took time for people’s gardening efforts to bear fruit and it was not until 1943 that the gardening campaign really made an impact on people’s diets. ‘All Russia was gripped by the garden campaign. Plots were distributed to individuals and groups through factories and institutions. Posters reminded that potatoes were a substitute for bread. Newspapers and magazines were full of articles teaching and advising amateur gardeners how to get a crop. There was a nightly and especially a week-end exodus to the suburbs, with travellers on the trams armed with spades and hoes neatly wrapped up to avoid injury to fellow passengers.’
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The number of private gardens tripled between 1942 and 1944.
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Irene Rush recalled that in the summer of 1943 Moscow ‘floated in a green sea of potato plants. Even rubbish tips had been cleared of rubbish, levelled out and neatly planted.’
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Rush and her friends fried the potatoes in a ‘smelly kind of greenish oil that people dubbed American machine oil’.
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Potatoes became known as the ‘second bread’.
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If food became bland and monotonous in Britain or Germany, it was far worse in the Soviet Union where the meals often consisted only of potatoes. ‘People cooked nothing but potatoes. They boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, roasted potatoes. They made potato cakes, potato soup, potato fritters. But every effort to disguise the outer form left the soul of the potato unchanged. You could see this when people paled on biting into the latest deception.’
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In a rather more desperate effort to extend food supplies the Soviet Academy of Sciences gathered together a commission to assess the suitability for human consumption of a range of wild meats. The list included foxes, gophers and mice, and a pamphlet on feral meat was produced which advised that squirrel meat contained more calories than pork. Leaflets were also printed detailing how to cook nettles, which are rich in protein and vitamins.
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It seems quite likely that the hungry Soviets took the nutritionists’ advice. Lydia Usova recalled
sitting in a park during the siege of Leningrad, ‘watching sparrows hopping about, and I found I had purely felt instincts – if only I could catch one of the sparrows and make soup of it! … there were the weeds we began to eat. In the mornings I would get up at about four o’clock and go to any refuse dump and pick nettles. If I managed to collect a handkerchief full it was wonderful!’
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In the extreme conditions of the war, the communist regime allowed the revival of the system of collective farm markets which it had long been trying to suppress. In effect it legitimized, or at least turned a blind eye to, the black market. The farm markets were the only places where milk and vegetables were sold.
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The Australian diplomat J. A. Alexander noted that at the government store where he bought his food ‘there were no eggs, fresh milk, fruit or vegetables to be bought at any price’.
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The peasants were struggling to feed themselves, and as the quantity of food sold at these markets fell significantly the scarcity of food meant that collective market prices were astronomical.
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In the 1930s a kilogram of potatoes on the collective farm market cost one rouble, compared to 18 kopeks in the state-run stores. In August 1944 Alexander noted that in the Moscow markets ‘half a dozen lbs [2.7 kg] of potatoes costs 20 roubles’.
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Only those with wealth, in the form of either cash or good-quality clothes and other household goods, were able to benefit fully from the markets. Nikolai Novikov, a middle-ranking Soviet diplomat who was evacuated to Kuibyshev, complained bitterly that his family’s ration was insufficient to feed even the children. He was fortunate to be able to barter the family’s clothes for butter, meat and milk.
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Margaret Wettlin observed that the Soviets were willing to barter anything they had for food. ‘People had developed the most absolute indifference to things … Only life was important … Dresses could go, furs could go, watches could go, shoes could go, everything formerly cherished could go without so much as a hanging on with the eyes. People would come in naked to the finish. And they did not care.’
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But many Soviets had neither money nor spare clothes. For those without such capital, bread became an alternative currency. It was forbidden to exchange ration bread for any other foodstuff, but in the collective farm market in Kuibyshev one kilogram of black bread, or about two days’ ration for a worker in the defence industry, could buy 300 grams of meat, or
160 grams of butter, perhaps six eggs, or 2 litres of milk, or 2 kilograms of potatoes.
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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.
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She and her friends, with their clothes hanging off their bodies, had begun to look like ‘waxworks figures that had started to melt’.
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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’.
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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’.
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Like the Red Army soldiers she and her flatmate used to make a bitter vitamin C brew out of pine needles steeped in water.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As they opened American cans, Soviet soldiers are said to have joked, ‘Well boys, here is the opening of the Second Front.’
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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Towards the end of the war lend-lease food may even have supported as much as one-third of the average civilian calorie consumption.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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