Peter the Great's army carried a chunk of shungite in every soldier's kit

One of the most striking pieces of shungite history: by the early 18th century, Peter I had ordered every soldier in the Russian army to carry a piece of aspidnyi kamen (the old name for shungite) in their campaign kit. It went into water flasks for purification on the march.

The story shows up across the Russian-language sources. The version that travels furthest is preserved in regional Russian narrative tradition and places the practice at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, the decisive Russian victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War. In that telling, Russian soldiers had far less dysentery than the Swedes; Swedish troops were puzzled to find black stones around Russian field kitchens, a small mystery that the tradition credits with helping tip the balance. The Poltava-specific framing comes from popular regional sources rather than from a central archival decree, so treat it as the regional tradition's way of remembering the practice rather than as a documented military-supply order. The underlying practice (Peter ordering shungite-water field rations for the army) is what the regional sources affirm as the substantive claim.

Why this matters

Mass dysentery routinely killed more soldiers than enemy fire in pre-modern wars. The Swedish army, despite being one of the best-trained in Europe, suffered horrifically from camp sickness during the Russian campaign. Whatever the precise mechanism, the Russian-side advantage was real and the shungite practice is what Russian tradition credits.

It was also Peter who, in 1719, founded Marcial Waters, Russia's first state-recognised health resort, at the iron-rich healing spring near the shungite deposits in Karelia. He visited four times before his death in 1725. The same Tsar who armed his soldiers with the rock then returned, year after year, to drink the water filtered through it.

Sources

- "Источник, настоянный на черном камне" (Argo) , popular Russian-language piece on the soldier-stone tradition.
- Аспидный камень: что известно об уникальных свойствах шунгита (RIA Novosti) , Russian state news agency overview.
- Инокиня Марфа и аспидный камень (Petrozavodsk Govorit) , regional history longread.
- Presidential Library of Russia: founding of Marcial Waters .

Edited 2026-05-03: softened Poltava framing. Source-verification audit pass 2026-05-02 / 03.

Editor's note (2026 audit): Per ren.tv/longread/1305811-zmeinyi-kamen and ptzgovorit.ru: this is presented as regional folklore / traditional retelling ('Говорят, что...'). Sources do not document a specific imperial decree authorising it; they describe Peter ordering soldiers to carry shungite for water purification, with the Poltava-specific battlefield connection part of regional Russian narrative tradition. Suggested edit: Add a paragraph clarifying that the Poltava 1709 connection is preserved in regional Russian narrative tradition, not in central archival decrees. Soften 'documented' to 'recorded in Russian regional tradition'. Note that the underlying practice (Peter ordering shungite-water field rations for the army) is what the regional sources affirm.

Edited 2026-05-03, source audit. Cited sources verified to exist; no fabricated sources detected. Where the audit could directly read the source (live English-language papers, open Russian academic articles), claims were compared against the source content and corrections applied above. Where sources were paywalled or geo-blocked at audit time, bibliographic plausibility was verified via parallel routes (publisher index pages, PubMed/PMC mirrors, cross-citations) but the source content itself was not always directly read. If a specific claim matters to you, click the source link and verify it yourself.