It is prosaic because this was disposable packaging akin to that of instant ramen—something that was supposed to be thrown away, not saved for posterity. It is remarkable because it is rare for such objects to survive. The wrapper was clearly only saved by the artist Evgenii Kogan, to whose collection it belongs, as an example of the illustration and graphic design work in which he was engaged as a member of the editorial board of the 50th Army’s newspaper, We’ll Crush the Enemy. More remarkable still is how this everyday, disposable object tells a variety of stories about the Second World War.

Marxist Millet (Stalinist Culinary Modernity)

One of the stories this package of millet tells is of the massive shifts in food production in the late 1920s-early 1930s and their impact on the lives of Soviet people. The Soviet state engaged in crash industrialization in the decade before the Second World War. It did this explicitly to prepare for war, which was seen as inevitable, and at the cost of the peasant majority. Peasants were forced into collective farms that allowed the state to extract crops and labor in what was essentially a colonial system that paid for machinery and fed urban populations. Tens of thousands were executed and hundreds of thousands dispossessed for resisting collectivization, while millions starved to death in the famine that followed immediately in its wake. Most soldiers in the ranks were drafted from these collective farms. The millet and other crops that were feeding them was produced by this oppressive system.

The millet’s concentrated, highly processed form was part of a push towards greater consumerism in the later 1930s, celebrated in Soviet propaganda. Modern Soviet people should have modern diets, which in the Soviet case meant processed, industrially produced food. Advertising campaigns highlighted the new products (theoretically) available to (urban) Soviet consumers. The apex of this were the All-Union Exhibit of the Accomplishments of Agriculture, opened in Moscow in 1939, and The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, first published in 1939. The Exhibit showcased the modernization of all aspects of Soviet life, but especially food production, to visitors to the capital.

The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food was essentially food pornography (in that it presented beautiful, stylized, and largely unattainable dishes) intended both to promote the new factories manufacturing Soviet comestibles and to teach Soviet people how to cook with the variety of concentrated and preserved foods they were producing.

Factories received medals and were named after living heroes—high-level party functionaries. This millet was produced by the Mikoian Moscow Order of Lenin Food Processing Plant—a factory in the capital named in honor of Anastas Mikoian, a long-serving top party member whose portfolio centered on the production of food and consumer goods. The new factories opened during industrialization were a major accomplishment, and The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food showcased them.

The ability to muster resources, including food, would be crucial to the Red Army winning the war, and the vast resources of the Soviet Union, in particular grain, made it a target of the Third Reich.

Nazi Food Security

Food security was a key priority of the Nazi party. Tracing their origins to Germany’s defeat in the First World War, a “stab in the back” by liberals and Jews and a home front that panicked after the “turnip winter” of 1917-1918, when both the German Reich and Habsburg Empire faced dire food shortages, the Nazis vowed to provide for the German people. Food and power were inextricably linked. The lean times of the postwar period and racialized thinking of the Nazis led them to overlapping goals. The Nazis planned to colonize the territory in “the East,” using the settlement of the West in the United States as a model.

The populations that inhabited those territories would be enslaved or exterminated, with hunger serving as the primary weapon. The Wehrmacht would “export” hunger to the Soviet Union and Poland, ensuring that no German went hungry while millions of Soviet civilians, POWs, and others living under occupation would starve to death to make way for settlement by “racially superior” Aryans. Those few who survived would serve as slave laborers without access to education or advancement. All urban inhabitants of the Soviet Union were slated for starvation and only those directly supplying the Wehrmacht with food would be allowed any rations. They estimated 30 million deaths by 1942. In short, they wanted to cut off resources, even a paltry 400 grams of millet, going to what they saw as “useless eaters” and racial inferiors.

Feeding the Red Army

The Red Army’s successful resistance in late 1941, despite its near collapse, dashed the Nazis’ hopes of a rapid conquest and reduced the toll of murder by famine. Liberating territories that had been under Nazi occupation revealed the stakes of the war—annihilation or victory. The spring and summer of 1942—the period in which this packet of millet would have been produced and consumed—saw a series of reversals for the Red Army. In his infamous Order No. 227, Stalin acknowledged the dwindling resources of the Soviet Union:

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. After the loss of Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltics, Donbas, and other regions, we have a lot less territory, and therefore we have a lot less bread and metal and fewer people, factories, and plants. We have lost over 70 million people, more than 800 million poods of grain a year, and more than 10 million tons of metal per year. We are no longer superior to the Germans in manpower or grain reserves. To retreat any further is to ruin yourself and to destroy our Motherland. 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.¹

This was a period of hunger for the entire army, and starvation on some fronts, as recorded in diaries, letters, and memoirs. The army noted that soldiers deserted in higher numbers during periods of hunger, and soldiers on some fronts and training in the rear died from hunger. Hunger was a potent weapon, one that had always been central to Nazi planning. This concentrated pack of millet could be the difference between life and death, desertion or toughening out conditions at the front, especially when provisioning ran short.

Soldiers would often carry concentrates and dried bread as an emergency reserve, and this period saw many commanders confiscating them and putting them under guard to ensure that soldiers didn’t eat these emergency calories without permission. While the millet package provides instructions for an individual soldier to prepare it, it is more likely that these tablets would have been thrown into the massive pot of a mobile field kitchen and doled out to soldiers prepared by a cook.

The grains that filled these pots were as likely to have been sown and harvested by soldiers as processed in a factory: subsidiary agriculture, in which soldiers helped grow the food they would eat, helped offset shortages of food in the Red Army from 1942 on. Soldiers were supposed to receive two dishes—one soup and one porridge—but had one mess-tin each, so provisioning itself was meant to bring them closer together by forcing them to share meals.

This system of field kitchens was very different from the American system of provisioning, which instead of freshly prepared food consisted of prepackaged “K” and “C” rations. These contained processed foods—crackers, canned meat, candies, and powdered drinks—as well as accessories such as cigarettes and toilet paper, even a disposable wooden spoon. In a way the American method represented the realization of the Soviet drive towards processed, high-tech consumer goods.

Machismo at the Front

One final aspect of this object—and certainly the reason that it was preserved—is Kogan’s drawing. This little flourish was similar to a drive to decorate rations in the US Army later in World War II—as it was found that decoration improved morale. Kogan’s image here reflects the machismo that Red Army soldiers were supposed to exude.

With a pile of gaunt German corpses in the background, two soldiers discuss fear, a very real emotion for most soldiers:

You probably felt some fear when the fascists attacked?

Yes, there was some fear . . .

What were you afraid of?

I was afraid that my porridge would get cold.

Mortal fears are shunt aside as fear of inconvenience takes place of prominence. There was little room for discussions of the psychological stress of war in Soviet propaganda, even in the darkest days of the war. The Soviet state mobilized soldiers’ fears of the fate of their loved ones should they lose the war, but weakness in the face of the terrors of modern combat was given short shrift.

Conclusion

This wrapper, a disposable object that normally would have ended up in the dustbin of history, can tell us essential stories about the largest conflict in world history—how the Soviet Union and Third Reich prepared for and imagined it, and how common soldiers experienced it. Kogan likely did not think that this particular work could be used to document the epic events of the war—his cartoons and etchings were much more clearly aimed at posterity—but we can be grateful that he saved this small, stained piece of paper.

Selected Bibliography

Gotz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

A.I. Barsukov et al., Prikazy narodnogo komissara oborony sssr 1941–1942 g. Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia. vol. 13 (2¬2) (Moscow: Terra, 1997).

Wendy Z. Goldman & Donald Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front during World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Wendy Z. Goldman & Donald Filtzer, eds., Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).

Brandon M. Schechter, The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

Lynne Viola “Collectivization in the Soviet Union: Specificities and Modalities,” in Constantin Iordachi, Arnd Bauerkämper, eds., The Collectivization of Agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe: Comparison and Entanglements (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), 49-77.

Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2006).