Shortage Of Food Was Chief Hardship Endured By Legation Members

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27273, 27 December 1949, Page 4

Shortage Of Food Was Chief Hardship Endured By Legation Members

Five Years In Russia

By Jean Boswell Wife of Mr C. W. Boswell, former New Zealand Minister to the Soviet. \ / * Copyright Reserved. No. IV. Moscow’s National Hotel, which houses all foreign diplomats for whom Legation premises are not available, is a four-storeyed, simple structure on the corner of Gorki street and' Alexander Square. The front faces the square, with its scenes of never-ending, interest —its teeming, polyglot people, streaming traffic, and, in the winter, great snow-ploughs pursuing their never-ceasing job of sweeping and heaping the snow, to keep the traffic lanes clear. Bounding the square on the right is the long, cream and canaryyello.w building which was once Queen Catherine’s riding school, but which now garages the mechanical horse power of the Kremlin cars. On its left is the Moscow Hotel, a much more pretentious edifice than the National and occupied mainly by important Russian officials and high-ranking army officers.

Facing the National, across the square, is the old Historical Museum—a building looking exactly like the facade presented by the old. turned blocks of my childhood—and nearby may be seen part of the Kremlin Park, part of the wall with several of the giant towers and the back of the long building comprising the Government offices. Two short streets connect Alexander Square with the Red Square, and the eye travels up past the clock tower' and the beautiful marble mausoleum that is Lenin’s Tomb to the extreme end of the square, where stands that extraordinary, heterogenous collection of onion and turnip domes, towers and spires, all in multicoloured mosaic—the famous St. Basil’s Cathedral. My guide eyed me suspiciously one day when, after hearing the legend of the Tsar who put out the eyes of the architect so that he would never be able to design another such cathedral, I remarked, “ Thank goodness he caught him in time! ” To me, St. Basil’s is an architectural “ funniosity.”

For luncheon, we had a thin vegetable soup, followed by a slice of often unidentifiable meat, with a spoonful of potatoes and a little carrot or cabbage. For dessert there would be a small piece of hard pastry spread with jam, or a ring of pale blue blancmange, or—horrible day!—a small dish of “keesel,” a thin jelly made with potato flour and fruit juice.

The National Hotel was known facetiously and commeseratingly in the corps as the “diplomatic concentration camp,” although its right to the name was contested hotly by the foreign correspondents who were accommodated in the Metropole and considered they had more claim to the designation. The National simply swarmed with ambassadors, ministers, coun-' sellors, office staffs—and secret service men. Not to forget dogs! It was our first experience of a hotel that assumed the character of a kennel as well as an accommodation house for humans. It was not pleasant, when paying friendly or formal calls, to have to share the divan with a snappy terrier or manoeuvre one’s feet continuously to avoid the caresses of a slobbering spaniel. The Russians themselves had neither dogs nor cats during war-time and for a couple of years afterward it was rare to see a domestic animal. Food, especially meat, was too scarce and expensive to be fed to pets. Rooms Without Daylight

Our quarters consisted of two small rooms with a tiny bathroom on the first floor at the back of the first wing. Every piece of furniture in it was a museum piece. Our windows looked out on to another wing, and except in summer, when we could open the window and stretch our necks, we never got a glimpse of the sky. Only during the summer, also, did we have any daylight in our rooms, and then but for a couple of hours a day. We lived in those rooms for seven months, only one month of which was summer, and the eyestrain from the §lare of continuous electric light may e imagined. Members of the office staff were even more unfortunate, for they had to use their bedrooms as offices as well as sleeping rooms. During the winters we all spent about 22 hours of the 24 in our rooms. We went for a daily walk, but in such bitter cold it was impossible to remain out for more than an hour or so, for once one becomes tired in such tem,peratures one grows frozen-cold, no matter how brisk the walk. So we had to be careful not to over-prolong our outings. All of us suffered in health to a greater or less degree. To my own breakdown I owed our change to other rooms. They were more commodious and, although colder than those we vacated, the extra daylight provided by more window space, coupled with the superb- view of the square, more than compensated for the lower temperatures. It was often unpleasantly cold, for all that. The central heating is governed by the calendar, not by the temperature, and no matter how cold the weather before the day appointed to start the heating, the heating starts on that day and no other. The service in the hotel was painfully slow, but civil and cheerful. The waiters were all elderly men—some quite old—who were unfit for war service. In fact one saw very few young men, other than students, in Moscow in those times. On each floor there was a “ floor hnanager,” a woman who generally spoke a little English or French. Her duty was to watch the service and attend to all the wants and complaints of the guests. The office was no sinecure, especially as regards complaints. Russian Procrastination The main trouble was, of course, the lack of hot water, but the electric lights and power points were close runners-up. Not a week passed but some electric fixture failed, and to our complaint would come the smiling assurance that the “ expert ” would be sent along “seeehas.” “ Seeehas ” means “ presently.” When the “ presently ” seems unduly prolonged, another complaint brings the same charming smile and the promise “ Skora boodyet,” which means “ Soon will be.” “Skora boodyet” failing to eventuate, a third complaint brings a sauve “ Porslia zavtra,” which is “ After tomorrow.” Almost invariably it is “ after tomorrow,” and you’re lucky at that. In our rooms the hot water was the sore trouble. In neither of the two suites we occupied during the 20 months we lived in that hotel did it function properly, and many times we were indebted to the Ambassadors of the United States and Canada for our baths. A Russian doctor shook his head in wonder when I complained about not being able to bathe every day. “It is not a Russian custom, Madame,” be said, gently. I told him it soon would be, if they had the hot water. He was not convinced. . One thing that surprised me m the hotel was the primitive cleaning equipment used by the housemaids. I never saw a hair broom nor a long-handled mop all the time I was there. The maids came in with a bunch of birch branches and a flat shovel, went down on their knees and swept the carpets inch by inch. To dust the floors around the carpets, they tied a cloth to the birch branches and. from a stooping position, swished it back and forth. What dust it did not take up, it distributed perhaps a bit more evenly. What I have to say now with regard to our food during all these months is not to be taken as a. criticism of the hotel management, for I am sure we were given the best possible under the circumstances. In any case, we fared a hundred times better than the ordinary Russian people themselves. One does not expect food in plenty in a country that has been devastated by an invading army, and further impoverished by a scorched-earth policy. Little or No Nourishment I state these facts, particularly for the thousands of people in our own country who were told that their representatives in the USSR were “ living in luxury ” in Moscow. We simply did not get enough to eat, and what we did get contained little or no nourishment.

Our evening meal was a yet more ' frugal repetition of our luncheon, except that sometimes the soup would be “schee,” or perhaps the*war-time apology for “borsch.” At one period we were over three months without a potato, except for a few scraps in our thin soup, and our meat course was served with a spoonful of rice, buckwheat and coarse, grey macaroni, each in daily turn. For some months we often went to bed hungry—hungry even if we ate which was to us unpalatable food. To some extent, it was a matter of our standards here, too, I suppose. At any rate, the waiters were bewildered that we could refuse' any food at all, more especially meat. To them it was a godsend when we left the meat, even at those times when it was so leathery that it resisted our knives, let alone our teeth. Indeed, it was pitiable to see just what they would accept. We had brought with us a certain amount of food from New Zealand, having been warned by other Legations of the position, but transport in Russia was so disorganised owing to the war that we did not receive the stores for nearly seven months. All the perishable packet goods had then become sp blue-mouldy and musty that they were quite uneatable. At least we thought them uneatable, but our waiters and maids accepted them thankfully. And the poignancy of my feelings may be imagined when one day I saw our elderly room maid, in her weekly turn-put of the rooms, pick up a crust of bread that had fallen behind the divan, wipe it swiftly on her apron and pop it into her mouth. No Right to Grumble

.But the fact that we felt we had no right to grumble with such sights before our eyes did not increase an appetite for our monotonous, badlycooked diet. Soon we lost all desire for food. Then, providentially, it was “ the army to the rescue ” —the British Army. There was a British Military Mission in Moscow at the time, and their commissariat department allotted the New Zealand Mission a share in the NAAFI stores. It was like manna from Heaven. On request, the hotel management, realising that the foreigners, especially the British and American foreigners, could not assimilate the Russian food, permitted us to use electric hot-plates in our rooms. The odours of cooking that came seeping from those hundreds of rooms must have been olfactory torment to those unfortunates who had no stores from their own countries. For months now our evening meal consisted alternately of baked beans, herrings, M and V and . sorfietimes, if we were liicky. steak-and-kidney pudding. When our own stores eventually arrived, we had jam, sugar, a little flour and canned vegetables.

I managed to buy, after much waiting, a small saucepan minus a lid and a tiny frying pan. I paid nearly ,£5 for the two, but with the help of a couple of fruit tins, what I managed to contrive in the way of meals—even to a dinner for three Ambassadors—would have, I am sure, won approbation even from my pioneer-mother. I am sure she would have thought me a worthy “ chip off the old block.” But our diet was not conducive to health and we suffered from various skin affections and often-recurring attacks of severe dysentery. The kindness of the American doctor at that time, who gave us every attention and treated us with the sulphanilimide drugs, will never be forgotten by at least two members of the cotps. Many of us would have been in a parlous state without his attention for the Russian doctors had none of the modern drugs for treating dysentery—not in Moscow, at least. It took a long time fbr the germ to work itself out of our systems, and the attacks recurred so frequently that for many months my diary seemed to be simply a log-book of recordings of what was known throughout the corps as the “ Moscow wog.” It was no respecter of persons, that “wog"—not even of personages. We were dosed with synthetic vitamins—by the pound-packet, it seemed to me—but it was fresh fruit and vegetables we needed, and they were unprocurable. I remember one fiercely cold day, when my Australian hotel neighbour and I were walking past the Bolshoi Theatre, where we saw a man offering for sale two little half-green lemons. I shall never forget how my mouth almost ran water at the sight. We clutched each other and literally slid across the icy street towards him, afraid that someone would beat us to our goal. Lemons at 15s Each We need not have worried. Those lemons were 30 roubles each, which, at our rate of exchange, was a little over 15s apiece. We ate one between us there and then, skin, pips and all, saving the other to be divided between our husbands. I know now that the Tree of Life, whose leaves are to be for the “ healing of the nations,” must be a lemon-tree.

A coveted honour during these times was an invitation to dine either at the United States or the Canadian Embassies for, besides having many of their own canned and packet delicacies, they had the money to be able to buy in the open markets, where the peasants sold their share of the produce from the collective farms. The prices soared high into the blue.

Breakfast had a routine of a tiny omlette made from dried egg, with black and grey bread—two small slices of each —bread and cheese and bread and sausage. Both cheese and sausage were cut so thin that one could roll them like cigarette papers.

But, if we reckoned our situation hard, how much harder was that of the Russian people—the patient, uncomplaining people, who not only willingly sacrificed themselves in order that their soldiers might have the more, but also cheerfully suffered yet more stringent rationing, in favour of their country’s foreign guests?