The case was not unusual, as other reports showed. ‘Rubbish is not collected, dirt is not cleaned,’ another note records. ‘The urinals are broken. The plumbing in the officers’ mess does not work.’34 Hygienic measures were neglected everywhere. The slaughterhouse that provided soldiers in Kursk province with meat had no running water, no soap, no meat hooks and no special isolator for sick animals. The staff who worked there had received no proper training and they had not been screened for infectious diseases of their own. Their filthy toilet was a few yards from the meat store, and like many others at the time, it had no doors. ‘Even the meat is dirty,’ the inspector wrote.35
Food was a standing grievance everywhere. This is true of all armies, as budget catering and hungry men are on a fixed collision course, but the Soviet case belongs in a special class. However cold it was outside, the barracks kitchen would be rank and fogged with grease. Lunch – a soup containing sinister lumps of meat, due to be served with black bread, sugar and tea – steamed on wood stoves in giant metal pots. ‘At home,’ one conscript complained, ‘I used to eat as much as I needed, but in the army I have become thin, even yellow.’ ‘The grub is awful,’ reported another. ‘We always get vile cabbage soup for lunch, and the bread is the worst: it’s as black as earth and it grinds against your teeth.’ In January 1939 alone there were at least five cases where groups of soldiers refused to eat, striking in the face of another inedible meal. In the first three weeks of the same month, army surgeons reported seven major instances of food poisoning, the worst of which, involving rotten fish, left 350 men in need of hospital treatment.36 Dead mice turned up in the soup in the Kiev military district; sand in the flour, fragments of glass in the tea and a live worm featured on menus elsewhere at the same time.37 Two hundred and fifty-six men suffered disabling diarrhoea in March when the tea they were served turned out to have been brewed with brackish, lukewarm water.38 A young conscript from the Caucasus republic of Georgia – a region famous even then for its good food – deserted after a few weeks in Ukraine, leaving behind a note that singled out the Soviet army diet. ‘I am going back to the mountains,’ he concluded, ‘to eat good Georgian food and drink our wine.’
One answer was to grow food on the army’s land. Here was one thing that former peasants could really be asked to do. As Roger Reese records in his account of pre-war army life, ‘By the late summer of 1932, one regiment already had more than two hundred hogs, sixty cows, more than one hundred rabbits and forty beehives.’39 Nothing had changed by 1939. The soldiers dug potatoes and cut hay, they milked cows and they slaughtered pigs.40 The work could be heavy, dirty and cold, so field duties were sometimes used as punishments. In all cases, farming took the men away from their military training and distracted them from the real purpose of their army service. But everyone’s priority was filling empty stomachs, and successful regimental farms made a real difference to the men’s diet. They also helped to lift morale. This was a time when almost everyone – not only soldiers, but collectivized peasants and even some communities of workers – was going hungry. While brightly painted new kiosks sold ice cream to the masses, most people were still forced to scrape and queue to buy staples like butter and meat. The soldiers had a guaranteed allocation, even if the quality was poor. It is a bleak commentary on Soviet life, but Reese himself concludes that ‘despite their poor accommodations, officers and soldiers generally had a slightly higher standard of living in the 1930s than the rest of Soviet society’.41
The point was that the soldiers did not have to forage. They did not have to walk for miles, as their parents might, or exchange their own wedding rings for food. Instead, they could expect to be issued with most of what they needed. They also had access to a network of closed military stores, the ZVK. At a time when goods at any price were scarce on the open market, Red Army men could buy, if their local store were reasonably run, a range of luxuries that included matches and tobacco, thread, razors, toothbrushes and pens. Like everything else in the Soviet Union, however, experience varied from place to place. Sometimes the stores were badly managed or the storekeepers corrupt. Sometimes the stores themselves were little more than barns. And everyone complained about the shortages. There never was enough tobacco, and the butter seemed to vanish within hours.
Soap, too, was a scarce item, and many soldiers mention that they never had the means to clean their teeth. Running water, after all, was only to be had on the occasions when the barracks’ bathroom worked. For a real wash, the soldiers knew they had to visit the steam baths, the famous Russian banya. This ritual was not purely for comfort. A hot bath (and a change of clothes) every ten days was the minimum needed to keep typhus-bearing lice at bay. But banyas were usually in town, perhaps a half-hour’s march away. One man remembered bathing every fortnight; others that they bathed no more than once a month.42 When war broke out in 1941, new conscripts would complain about the dirt that made them itch and stink and brought them out in boils. But the old hands were used to it. In peacetime, the life of Red Army soldiers was mostly about getting used to things. Whatever understanding a young conscript may have had of Soviet life – and some had nurtured schoolboy dreams, however garbled, about opportunity and social justice – the army narrowed them and rubbed them coarse.
Another source of inconvenience was crime. The army’s warehouses and stores always attracted local spivs. Pilfering was common in soldiers’ kitchens despite the unappealing quality of the food. Cooks were often accused of selling the meat and fats that should have gone to thicken army soup, but kitchens were the last link in a chain that stretched back to the warehouses and transport trains. Small thefts – a typical case involved 50 metres of footcloth material – were daily events,43 but if there was a chance, perhaps because of troop movements, to evade the police, there were livings to be made on a much grander scale. ‘Our checks in the units have shown that the supply workers connive in theft if they are not directly involved in it themselves,’ a 1941 report declared. In one district, ‘583 greatcoats, 509 pairs of boots and 1,513 belts have disappeared.’ Among the other stolen goods was food.44
The army, then, was certainly a training ground, but some of what it taught would find no place in any decent service manual. As the men dug their potatoes or joined teams working on the barracks roof, they may have wondered when their formal army work might start. They would, in fact, find little time to be real soldiers, not least because their ideological training was never supposed to slip. In any working day, men would attend at least one class about politics; a lecture on Stalin’s analysis of capitalism, perhaps, or a question-and-answer session about the moral qualities of the ideal officer. Ideology was not regarded as an adventitious growth on army life, or even as a mere morale-booster, equivalent to religion. In these last years before the war, the Soviet state cast soldiers in the role of propaganda ambassadors. As the people’s vanguard, its sword and defender, they were supposed to represent right thinking for society as a whole. Part of the idea was that conscripts would return to their civilian lives and act as models, examples in word and deed. But to achieve this they had first to be transformed. To be a decent soldier, let alone, for the minority, a communist, a person was supposed to be sober, thoughtful, chaste and ideologically literate.