Trophies of War

This chapter focuses on all manner of trophies, from German prisoners of war to objects looted from houses in the Third Reich. Between 1941 and 1945, soldiers of the Red Army were confronted with an enemy who was often better dressed, wealthier, and initially much more effective. First on Soviet territory and then abroad, Red Army soldiers confronted an alien culture. For average citizens, this trip abroad was a unique chance to go beyond Soviet borders, one that came at great personal risk and with a clear objective—to destroy Fascism and the Third Reich. What soldiers saw along the way was puzzling. They not only reckoned with material objects and institutions that the Soviet Union had purged but were also left to wonder why people who lived materially so much better than they did had waged a genocidal war against them, marked by systematic rape, pillaging, and wanton destruction. The chapter then shows how a Soviet understanding of jurisprudence and a particular perception of the bourgeois world combined with a desire for vengeance to both justify looting and frame Soviet understandings of the Third Reich.

The State’s Pot and the Soldier’s Spoon

This chapter focuses on provisioning in the Red Army, tracing how soldiers ate, the ways the government positioned itself as provider, and the logic of who deserved more or less food under conditions of extreme shortage. 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. Ultimately, 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. The chapter then considers 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.