For the best part of 400 years, the Tsarist / Soviet / Russian military (and other Eastern European soldiers) wrapped strips of cloth, known as “portyanki,” around their feet before strapping on their boots and going into battle.
More than a decade after the Russian Ministry of Defense abandoned the archaic foot covering, the Moscow Times reported on Monday that Rosgvardia, Russia’s National Guard, has finally recognized that a change of the obsolete item was necessary.
A draft order posted on the Guard’s federal portal announced the change, along with rules about permissible colors of underwear to be worn on duty, as necessary to “preserve the health” of its troops.
Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s current Security Council Secretary and former Defense Minister, introduced the change to Russia’s armed forces in 2014 when he is said to have said to his generals: “How many times a week do you shower – every day, sometimes twice a day?”
“So why do we allow our soldiers, conscript or contract, to only wash once every seven days? To change his underwear once a week? Why do we, living in the third millennium, continue to wear foot wraps and boots, like in the First World War?
Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Army Gen. Dmitry Bulgakov told RIA Novosti at the time that “We no longer wear foot wraps in the Russian armed forces. The troops have completely switched to wearing socks, which we purchased.”
In addition, Shoigu is said to have boasted in an interview marking his 70th birthday that he had also arranged for more than 14,000 showers to be installed in army barracks, vacuum cleaners replaced rags and buckets for cleaning, old uniforms were replaced, and the term of service for conscripts was reduced from two years to one.
Now, it seems, it is the turn of the Russian National Guard – which is not controlled by Russia’s Ministry of Defense. A member of Russia’s State Duma, Yevgeny Revenko, applauded the move in an interview with the in-house magazine Parlamentskaya Gazeta on Monday, saying,
“Foot wraps were perfect for the footwear we wore in the 18th century… canvas in summer kept the foot cool… flannel in the winter kept the soldiers’ feet warm. Socks would have been unable to withstand the loads that those boots put on the fabric.”
Revenko said that “Nowadays, footwear is completely different, it is softer, more practical, more comfortable… Wearing foot wraps today would be like cleaning a modern firearm with a brick… away with foot wraps, long live socks.”
When asked for his views on the passing of the footwrap, one old soldier was quoted as saying: “The portyanki is too complicated a gadget for a modern conscript to master…”