The film "Enemy at the Gates" portrays a freshly minted unit of the Red Army being issued their weapons before being tossed into combat at Stalingrad. Each soldier is issued either a rifle or a small number of bullets, and the unarmed one is supposed to "assist" the one with the rifle and pick up the rifle if the rifleman is killed.Keegan's history of the First World War cites stories of similar events taking place in the Czar's army (calling them "nothing less than the truth"), which lines up with my conception of the extremely poor state of logistics and military industry in Russia until sometime in 1915, but I've never heard an academic source describe the Red Army of WWII doing the same thing. Is it known whether this happened in Stalin's armies, and if so, whether it was any sort of routine or regular thing or just an occasional expedient?
This thread should be of interest.
The quote from Keegan is: "The stories of Russian infantrymen waiting unarmed to inherit the rifle of another killed or wounded were not tittle-tattle; they were nothing less than the truth"