I've heard that Russian soldiers in the Great War often had no rifle (due to the government only being able to support half the army). Is there any truth to that? Another thing I've heard is that two soldiers shared one rifle.
The reason for my asking is that I'm making a book, where a young soldier tries to survive on the battlefield without a gun. He has to use stones, tree branches his fists, etc. until he picks up a gun from a dead soldier. I want to illustrate the extreme conditions Russian soldiers were under in WWI, though, I need to know if they were actually in the conditions advertised.
It's a complex topic, about which I wrote before here
TL;DR: The Russians were in desperate need of rifles and used many outdated black-powder rifles for rear-line troops, but the notion of the Russians going into battle with one man carrying a rifle and the other following appears to be more of a movie myth anything else.