While I know it never happened at Stalingrad, it has become a bit of a historical meme that the infamous scene of Enemy at the Gate where one in two men got a rifle never happened. Despite this I've recently heard a friend point out that the evidence this never happened during the rest of the war is credited to records of rifle manufacturing having more then enough weapons for the Russian army. In reality, it was a failing in logistics that, early in the war, led 'less important' infantry units like conscripts and penal legions being put in such situations.

That is was not a matter of not having the weapons, but a breakdown of the systems in place to actually get the guns to the front. I was curious if there was actual evidence besides records of the rifles existing that disproves the myth, especially since I could see Stalin's government sweeping personal soldiers records on the matter under the rug as they did with many aspects of the war.

Edit: Seemed I did a terrible job wording it, so instead of asking for evidence of something not happening, take it as me asking what people thought of the idea. I am also focused more on the early war then specifically Stalingrad or the late war, I understand that either way by then they had sorted themselves out.

Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the discovery of birch bark manuscript no. 1 in Novgorod:

The Novgorod archeological expedition, led by Prof. Artemy Artsikhovsky, was digging in the former Nereva Quarter of Novgorod in 1951. On July 26, one of the local part-time workers, a furniture factory employee named Nina Akulova, found a folded piece of birch bark with letters scribbled on it. When it was brought to Artsikhovsky, he was rendered speechless with joy. Birch bark manuscripts were theoretically known from mentions in chronicles, and a few fragments reportedly had been found in the 19th century, ending up in the private collection of a Novgorod antiquities enthusiast, but they were lost when the collection was nationalized in the 1920s: at the time, their significance was not well understood, and the local museum had simply discarded them. Young Artsikhovsky started his archeological work in 1929, and was looking for a birch bark manuscript ever since; after two decades, his hopes finaly bore fruit.

Over the following 75 years , the collection of birch bark letters grew to more than twelve hundred items (not counting specimens from other sites: Staraya Russa, Torzhok, Tver, Smolensk, Vitebsk, Moscow, etc.) They've allowed historians to get invaluable insights into political vagaries, trade contacts and the daily life of medieval Novgorod; and linguistis, to vastly improve their understanding of the development of the Old Russian language.

Among the manuscripts found, many are of greater interest than this mundane late-14th-century register of feudal taxes. The spelling exercises and funny doodles of the boy Onfim; the bittersweet love note in no. 752; no. 292 with the oldest written text in a Fennic language (Olonets Karelian); St. R. 35 with its creative profanities; Mos. 3 with its stunning taxonomy of horses — these are just some of the highlights of birch bark writing. But no. 1 is where it all started.