Starved In Prison To Avoid The Good Life

"... among the pows of many nationalities only the Soviets lived like this and died like this. None were worse off than the Soviets. Even the Poles, even the Yugoslavs, existed in far more tolerable conditions; and as for the English and the Norwegians, they were inundated by the International Red Cross with parcels from home. They didn't even bother to line up for the German rations. Wherever there were Allied pows camps next door, their prisoners, out of kindness, threw our men handouts over the fence, and our prisoners jumped on these gifts like a pack of dogs on a bone. 

The Russians were carrying the whole war on their shoulders and this was the Russian lot. Why? Gradually, explanations came in from here and there: it turned out that the U.S.S.R. did not recognize as binding Russia's signature to the Hague Convention on war prisoners. That meant that the U.S.S.R. accepted no obligation at all in the treatment of war prisoners and took no steps for the protection of its own soldiers who had been captured...

We did not recognize that 1907 convention until 1955. Incidentally, in his diary for 1915, Melgunov  reports rumors that Russia would not let aid go through to its prisoners in Germany and that their living conditions were worse than those of all other Allied prisoners -  simply in order to prevent rumors about the good life of war prisons inducing our soldiers to surrender willingly. There was some sort of continuity of ideas here."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL. 1.