Field mail vov 1941 1943. How to establish the fate of a serviceman who died or went missing during the Great Patriotic War. The role of field mail in the civil war

Starting from the first days of the Great Patriotic War, when most of the male population left their homes and joined the ranks of the Soviet Army, the only thread that made it possible to receive at least some news from home was the postal service. Urgent mobilization often made it impossible even to say goodbye to relatives before being sent to the front. Well, if someone managed to send home a postcard, with the number of his echelon. Then close people could at least come and say goodbye at the station. But sometimes there was no such possibility, families were instantly separated for long months and even years, forced to live and fight, not knowing anything about their relatives. People went to the front, into the unknown, and their families were waiting for news about them, waiting for the opportunity to find out if their loved ones were alive.

The government was well aware that in order to maintain the emotional spirit of the fighters at the proper level, it was necessary to ensure the uninterrupted operation of the post office. The bulk of the soldiers were driven not only by the desire to defend their homeland and liberate it from the hated invaders, but also by the desire to protect the dearest people who remained somewhere far in the rear or in the territory already occupied by the enemy. The leadership of our country was aware that one of the main tasks at the most terrible, initial stage of the war was to fight the confusion and panic that seized millions of Soviet citizens. And significant support and confidence for the fighters, in addition to ideological propaganda, can be provided by an established connection with the house. The Pravda newspaper in August 1941, in one of its editorials, wrote about how important the well-functioning post office is for the front, since "every letter or parcel received gives strength to the soldiers and inspires them to new feats."

According to eyewitnesses, a letter delivered on time from home was much more important for the soldiers of the Soviet Army than a field kitchen and other modest benefits of front-line life. And thousands of women across the country spent hours waiting for postmen in the hope that they would finally bring them news from their husbands, sons and brothers.

After the introduction of martial law in the country, the fact of the poor organization of the work of the communications service was revealed, which could not properly ensure the timely delivery of even the most important messages and letters to the locations of the army units. Stalin called communication the “Achilles heel” of the Soviet Union, while noting the need to raise it to a whole new level as a matter of urgency. Already in the first days of the war, he called the People's Commissar of Communications of the USSR I.T. Peresypkin for a report on the urgent measures developed to transfer state communications to martial law. And for this, a radical restructuring of all available means of communication, including mail, was necessary.

Peresypkin Ivan Terentyevich was born in 1904 in the village of Protasovo, Oryol province. His father was a poor peasant, in order to live at the age of thirteen, Ivan began to work at the mine. In 1919, he volunteered for the growing strength of the Red Army and fought on the Southern Front against Denikin. After the end of the civil war, Peresypkin worked as a policeman, and in 1924 he graduated from the Ukrainian Military-Political School and was sent as a political fighter to the First Cavalry Division of Zaporozhye. In 1937, Ivan Terentyevich graduated from the Electrotechnical Academy of the Red Army and received the post of military commissar of the Research Institute of Communications of the Red Army. On May 10, 1939, he was appointed People's Commissar of Communications, in July 1941 - Deputy People's Commissar of Defense, and on February 21, 1944, he became Marshal of the Signal Corps. During the war years, signalmen under the leadership of Ivan Peresypkin solved with honor many of the most difficult tasks. Suffice it to say that more than three and a half thousand communications units were organized for various purposes, and the number of this type of troops has quadrupled, reaching almost one million people. Every tenth Soviet soldier was a signalman. The means of communication worked in fourteen strategic defensive and thirty-seven strategic offensive operations, 250 front-line offensive and defensive operations. After the end of the war until 1957, Peresypkin commanded the signal troops, engaged in their combat training, developing and improving new means of communication, introducing them into units and formations. Ivan Terentyevich died on October 12, 1978 and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

The changes were primarily due to the fact that when delivering letters to the front, there was no specific postal address familiar to the postman, indicating the street and house. It was necessary to develop completely new principles for the operation of the mail, which would allow the rapid and unmistakable delivery of correspondence to military units, the location of which was constantly changing. However, due to the importance of being able to quickly and remotely resolve issues related to command and control, priority in the modernization of communications was given to telephony and radio.

The head of the communications department of the Red Army, Gapich, was removed from his post by Stalin, and all his duties were assigned to Peresypkin, who now combined two positions at once: the chief of communications of the army and the deputy people's commissar of defense, while remaining people's commissar of communications. Such a decision was quite natural. Being an energetic and strong-willed person, the new thirty-nine-year-old communications chief was also a skilled and competent organizer. It was he who proposed, contrary to accepted norms, to call up civilian specialists to the active army, who were instructed to urgently establish the unsatisfactory work of the military postal service.

It is not known how successfully the new personnel would have coped with the tasks assigned to them, if not for His Majesty. The case: during one of the military operations, the charter of the field postal service of the German troops fell into the hands of the Soviet military. And since the Wehrmacht's mail service was always at the proper level, the translation and study of such a valuable document made it possible to successfully use enemy technology for the needs of the Soviet army in a few weeks. However, the use of a well-designed German model did not eliminate purely Soviet problems. In the very first weeks of the war, postal workers faced the banal problem of a lack of envelopes. It was then that triangle letters appeared, folk letters, when the sheet with the letter was simply folded several times, and the recipient's address was written on the upper side. These famous symbols of hope and a strong connection between the front and the rear were often mentioned by the authors of works about the Great Patriotic War. The war did not take away people's desire to continue to live and love. They wrote about dreams and hopes that everything will get better, and life will return to its usual course in their letters.

The triangle letter was a sheet of rectangular paper, folded first from right to left, and then from left to right. The remaining strip of paper was inserted inside. A stamp was not required, the letter was not sealed, as everyone knew that censorship would read it. On the outside, the destination and return addresses were written, and a clean space was left for the marks of postal workers. Since the notebooks were worth their weight in gold, the message was written in the smallest handwriting, all the available space was filled. Similar triangle letters were folded even by small children who built a message for a folder from an ordinary piece of newspaper. If the addressee had already died by the time the letter was delivered, then the death record was made on the triangle, the destination address was crossed out and returned back. Often such a triangle replaced the "funeral". In rare cases, when the addressee was reported missing or was shot for cowardice, the letter was destroyed. If a soldier was transferred to another unit, ended up in an infirmary or hospital, then a new address was put in place for notes. Some of these forwarded letters disappeared for a long time, finding the addressee years after the war.

The address on the letter that had to be delivered to the front was written at the beginning of the war as D.K.A. - Active Red Army. Then the serial number of the teaching staff or field postal station, the regiment number and the place of service of the soldier were indicated. Over time, the use of such a system of addresses showed that there was a possibility of disclosing the location of active units and subdivisions. The mail seized by the enemy near the location of the Soviet military groups provided him with all the information about the place of their deployment. This, of course, was unacceptable. According to the order of the People's Commissar of Defense, it was adopted new instruction on addressing postal correspondence for the Red Army during the war period. After the acronym D.K.A. and the PPS numbers began to indicate a special conditional code of the military unit, which was known only to those who read the order to assign the corresponding number to a specific military unit.

Even before the war, the private life of Soviet citizens was the subject of close state control, and wartime had no effect on the current state of affairs. Just the opposite. All mail was carefully checked, censorship was total, the number of censors doubled, and there were at least ten political controllers for each army. The private correspondence of relatives was no longer their personal affair. The inspectors were interested not only in the data contained in the letters about the deployment of units and their numbers, the names of commanders and the number of casualties, but also the emotional mood of the soldiers of the active army. It is no coincidence that postal censorship during the war years was directly subordinated to SMERSH, the Main Directorate of Counterintelligence in the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR. One of the “softest” types of postal censorship was the erasing of lines containing information that, according to the inspectors, was unacceptable for transmission. Obscene expressions, criticism of the army order and any negative statements about the situation in the army were crossed out.

An episode from the biography of the writer A.I. Solzhenitsyn, when in the winter of 1945, in a letter to Vitkevich, he expressed his negative attitude towards the ruling elite and allowed himself to criticize the existing order, for which he soon paid with his freedom.

The mail censors were mostly girls, and it often happened that photos of handsome young fighters were strangely missing from the letters. Abusing, thus, their office opportunities, the girls started postal novels with the correspondents they liked. War is war, and youth took its toll. Correspondence became commonplace, in the newspapers one could find the addresses of those who would like to correspond with a soldier. Except in isolated cases, as a rule, the continuation of these virtual novels was postponed until the end of the war.

It is also interesting that during the war years, letters to the front sometimes reached faster than today. This was due to the fact that the People's Commissar of Communications achieved exceptional conditions for the delivery of army mail. No matter how densely the railroad was packed, the postal trains were skipped in the first place, and their stops were considered unacceptable. In addition, mail was transported using all available modes of transport, depending on the conditions of the area - in special mail cars, on ships, mail planes, cars and even on motorcycles. The use of postal transport for any other needs was strictly prohibited. Along with the combat support of the army, military postal cargo was given priority.

Carrier pigeons were used in a number of areas to deliver mail, which freely carried secret messages across the front lines in places where an aircraft could never fly unnoticed. German snipers even tried to shoot the unfortunate birds, groups of special hawks were issued to destroy them, but most of the carrier pigeons still managed to successfully deliver information to their destination. To reduce the possibility of detection by Soviet scientists, a special breed of carrier pigeons was bred, capable of flying at night.

The Soviet military was sometimes able to intercept mail shipments for the German army. A careful study of the letters of enemy soldiers testified that the bravura mood of the German army that prevailed in the first year of the war after the cold winter of 1941-1942 was replaced by a feeling of anxiety and uncertainty. In their free time from hostilities, political instructors arranged a mass reading of German letters, which gave the soldiers of the Red Army additional strength and confidence in the success of their good deed.

In 1941, on the eve of the counter-offensive near Moscow, Soviet intelligence managed to shoot down and capture a German mail plane with hundreds of thousands of letters on board. After processing the captured mail by SMERSH employees, the data was presented to Marshal Zhukov. The information received testified that desperate defeatist moods reigned in the German army on this sector of the front. The Germans wrote home that the Russians had shown themselves to be excellent warriors, they were well-armed, fighting with unprecedented fury, and the war would certainly be difficult and protracted. Based on this information, Zhukov issued an order for an immediate offensive.

In addition to delivering letters, the post office was assigned the mission of distributing propaganda leaflets, which were supposed to affect the psychological mood of the German soldiers and undermine faith in the beliefs instilled in them by the command. A huge "ideological machine" worked on the content of the leaflets. An excellent example is the leaflet "The salvation of Germany in the immediate cessation of the war", written by the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and at the same time a talented propagandist Mikhail Kalinin, who had an exceptional gift of persuasion. The Germans, for their part, also periodically dropped leaflets or stuffed shells with them and fired in the direction of the Soviet trenches. Quite often these pieces of paper were printed on tissue paper. good quality counting on the fact that some Russian soldier will certainly pick it up for rolling and, of course, read it.

I would like to quote separate lines from the leaflet “The salvation of Germany in the immediate cessation of the war”: “... Take a sensible look and at least think a little - two million German soldiers died, not to mention the prisoners and the wounded. And the victory is even further than it was a year ago. Hitler does not feel sorry for ordinary German people, he will kill another two million, but victory will also be far away. There is only one end to this war - the almost complete destruction of the male population of Germany. The female youth will never see the young Germans, for they are dying in the snows of the USSR, in the sands of Africa. By surrendering voluntarily as a prisoner, you dissociate yourself from the criminal Nazi gang and bring the end of the war closer. Surrendering as a prisoner, you save the vital population of Germany ... ". Thus, the essence of the slogan put forward by Soviet propaganda is not to go into captivity for the sake of saving lives, but for the sake of saving one's homeland.

The main number of postmen or forwarders, as they were then officially called, were men. This was no coincidence, since the total weight of the load that they had to carry, in addition to the usual uniforms, consisted of many letters and newspapers and was almost equal to the weight of a machine gun. However, the weight of the treasured postman's bag was measured not by kilograms of letters, but by human emotions and tragedies that came along with them.

The appearance of a postman in every house was both expected and feared at the same time, because the news could be not only good, but also tragic. Letters in the rear became practically messengers of fate, each of them contained the answer to the most important question - is the one who is expected and loved alive? Such a situation imposed a special responsibility on the carrier, each postman had to experience both joy and sorrow every day, along with his addressees.

An interesting phenomenon that has become widespread among Soviet soldiers is the "scribes". Not all military personnel could competently and beautifully write a letter to their beloved girlfriend or mother. Then they turned for help to more trained and educated comrades. In each part, there were experts recognized and respected by all, from whom one could take a sample letter or ask them to dictate its text live.
By the end of 1941, the Soviet military mail was already working as a well-oiled mechanism. Up to seventy million letters were delivered to the front every month. The staff of the postal sorting stations worked around the clock to avoid interruptions and delays. However, they sometimes still happened if the military unit retreated or was surrounded. It also happened that letters perished along with the postal trains or disappeared without a trace in the bag of the postman killed during their delivery. But in most cases, every effort was made to ensure that each letter reached its addressee as quickly as possible, even if he was in a temporarily besieged territory.

Every conceivable and unimaginable means was sometimes used to deliver mail. So letters came to Sevastopol by submarines, and to Leningrad they were first taken through Lake Ladoga, and after the blockade was broken in 1943, on a recaptured narrow stretch of land through a built secret thirty-three-kilometer railway corridor. Later, this route, by analogy with the Ladoga Road of Life, was called the Road of Victory.

On February 6, 1943, all military units and their subunits were assigned new conditional numbers. Now the front-line soldier's postal address consisted of only five digits: the number of the military unit and field mail. As the Soviet troops moved west, it was necessary to restore postal communications in each recaptured area. Fortunately, during the war years, the mechanism was worked out to perfection, and most importantly, there were high-class communications specialists.

After the Red Army crossed the border of the USSR on December 1, 1944, and the war was already nearing its end, the State Defense Committee adopted a special resolution, according to which all servicemen of the active army were allowed to send a parcel of the established weight home once a month. In just four months in 1945, the post office was able to deliver ten million parcels to the rear of the country, for the transportation of which it took more than ten thousand two-axle mail cars. Basically, the soldiers sent home clothes, dishes and soap, and the officers could afford to send more valuable "souvenirs". When post offices began to pile up mountains of unsent parcels, the government decided to introduce additional mail and baggage trains. Today, it is difficult to imagine with what feelings the home front residents, exhausted by years of deprivation, hurried to the post office to receive parcels with truly royal gifts, among which the most valuable were the dry rations of American soldiers, consisting of canned food, jam, egg powder and even instant coffee.

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Field mail has always played a key role among all its other types that have ever existed on the territory of Russia. She then occupied a leading position, then disappeared for quite a long time. But as soon as military conflicts were unleashed somewhere and active hostilities began, it immediately again came to the fore.

Under the field mail, it is customary to understand a special service that provides courier-postal communications for troops. It has such a name in peacetime, and in wartime it becomes a military field.

Why such mail does not use the usual address writing system

In order for postal delivery to be carried out without interruption, each has its own field mail number, to which letters are sent. Until 1942, the numbering of the mailboxes of military units was imperfect, and in the event that the enemy intercepted mail near the location of troops, it could reveal not only the actual numbers of military units, but even their location. But after the Order of the NPO SSR No. 0679 was signed on October 5, 1942, in which they set out detailed instructions on sending mail to the Red Army, all the shortcomings were corrected. Since that time, if you do not know the number of the military unit, its name, and location, then a search by field mail number will not give any accurate information. Such data is considered secret and is not subject to disclosure, not only when hostilities are underway, but even in peacetime.

History of field mail

The date of foundation of the field mail is considered to be 1695. Its founder was the last tsar of all Russia and the first Russian emperor Peter I. This happened during the famous Azov campaigns. Regular Russian field mail existed throughout the campaign (April 1695 - August 1696) in two directions of troop movements: along the Volga and along the Don. The postal service was fast enough. So, letters sent from Moscow reached the desired addressee in the Azov region on about the 15th day.

The name "field mail" appeared only in May 1712, and was finally fixed thanks to the Military Charter of Peter I only in 1716. At the beginning of the 18th century (during the Northern War), the so-called lines of "hurry connections". "Mail to the regiments" was used temporarily, and it was initially serviced by dragoons, who were later replaced by ordinary coachmen.

The next heyday of the field mail came in 1812, when it was used to provide communication between various parts of the army. She also carried out communications with St. Petersburg, Moscow and the rear. When Napoleon began an active advance towards Moscow, many new postal routes were organized (almost every station had from 30 to 50 horses, which were supplied by the population). After the Napoleonic troops were defeated and pushed back to the border, the field mail followed and ended up practically in Paris.

The role of field mail in the civil war

In Soviet times, field mail was given great importance, especially when it thundered across the country. It was then that an order was signed (No. 233 of February 29, 1920), which stated that in no case should mail cars be detained on the railway. In order for them to be in constant motion, the commandants of absolutely everyone were obliged to attach them to any trains. At that moment, they were equal in importance to wagons with military cargo. In addition, this order stated that the delivery of mail for the Red Army was not only of undeniable military importance, but also moral and political.

Field mail and the Great Patriotic War

During the war, communication between military units, ships, various military educational institutions, enterprises, as well as with the population was carried out by military field mail. At this most tragic stage in the history of our country, not only soldiers became heroes, but also postal workers who delivered correspondence to active military units, risking their own lives. They also had to take up arms and protect their valuable cargo, because if the correspondence fell into the hands of the enemy, then our army could suffer huge losses.

It should be noted that the WWII field mail delivered about 70 million letters and 30 million newspapers to the Red Army per month. The largest volume of correspondence was between front-line soldiers and their relatives, who were in the rear.

Even at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the Office of the Military Field Post was created (on the basis of the Main Directorate of Communications of the Red Army). Also, special departments were created at the fronts and at all army headquarters, and postal field stations were created in units.

Features of sending mail to the front line

Letters continued to be delivered even during the blockade of Leningrad and the siege of Sevastopol. The field mail did not stop its work, despite hunger, cold and constant shelling. Correspondence was brought on sleds, carts, and even simply carried by hand.

During the endless bombing of the capital, employees of the military field post offices had to work in the most severe conditions. The received correspondence was sorted and sorted not only in dugouts and huts, but even simply on the ground or in a clearing in the forest. Very often it was necessary to deliver letters to addressees, crawling under a machine-gun fire, passing through minefields. The main goal was to deliver letters from relatives to soldiers in the trenches, and documents to commanders in dugouts. It was the news from their home that gave the fighters the strength to continue to defend their homeland.

Letter-triangle - news from the front

Postal delivery was carried out both to the front and from the front line to the rear. When the postmen got to the desired military unit under the Katyusha volleys, they took away letters in the shape of a triangle. These were news to relatives from the front, who said that their sons and husbands were still alive.

In the Soviet Union, front-line letters were sent completely free of charge. They were specially folded in the shape of a triangle (with this method, it was absolutely not necessary to use envelopes, which were quite difficult to get at the front line).

Such letters were formed quite simply: they took a rectangular sheet (most often pulled out of the most ordinary notebook), bent first from right to left, and then vice versa - from left to right. At the same time, a small strip of paper remained, which was inserted into the resulting triangle. Of course, no one sealed the letters (every letter from the front went through a censorship procedure so that the enemy would not know the plans of the Red Army), stamps were not used, and the address was simply written on top of the sheet.

In the field mail of the former USSR, a special numbering system was used for various military units and locations. Where a regular address should be written, letters and numbers were indicated. The first were the letters of the military unit, which meant the military unit, then followed by a five-digit number series - the code of a certain unit, at the end they wrote a letter (it denoted an internal unit). It should be noted that in the Soviet Union, the delivery of postcards and letters to conscripts (both to them and back) was free of charge.

The current state of field mail in the Russian Federation

In our time, field mail has not lost its significance. It, as before, is the key to ensuring communication between various military formations. Now each military unit has its own designation, which consists of five (four) numbers and a letter (for example, No. 54321-U or military unit No. 01736-C).

In order for the (field) post of the Russian Federation to continue its work, the country's leadership constantly made the necessary decisions to support and improve it. So, in one of the orders of the State Committee of the Russian Federation for Communications and Information (No. 104 of December 25, 1997), it was indicated that on ordinary letters and postcards (weighing up to 20 g), which are sent from military units and sent through the territory of the Russian Federation, should stand stamp triangular shape. This stamp confirms that the letter does not require postage. Well, if it weighs more, then the shipment is carried out on a general basis (at the rate).

By the way, triangle letters have not yet become obsolete, because envelopes are still very difficult to get in places of hostilities, so this method is still actively used.

Employees of the Immortal Regiment MIPOD Search Center are often asked the question: "How can I find information about a soldier by field mail number?".

It is to this topic that we decided to dedicate today's issue of "Search Tricks".

So, first you need to answer the question, what, in fact, is field mail.

In accordance with the definition contained in the Great Philatelic Dictionary, field mail is a special type of mail for serving military personnel where there are no stationary postal institutions of state mail, or in the army in wartime (military field mail).

Each military unit during the Great Patriotic War had its own field mail number. Already at the very beginning of the war, on the basis of the Main Directorate of Communications of the Red Army, the Directorate of Military Field Mail was created. On the fronts and in all army headquarters, special departments were created, and in units - postal field stations. The numbering system for mailboxes of military units was put into effect on June 22, 1941 and was in effect until the Order of the NPO of the USSR dated September 5, 1942 No. 0679 "On the Enactment of the "Instructions for Addressing Postal Correspondence in the Red Army in Wartime", which corrected a number of existing shortcomings.So, with the previous numbering system, the enemy, when intercepting mail, could calculate not only the actual numbers of military units, but also their locations.

From February 6, 1943, the existing 4-digit numbers of field postal stations began to be replaced by 5-digit conditional numbers.

It should be noted that during the war the field mail delivered about 70 million letters and 30 million newspapers to the Red Army per month. The largest volume of correspondence was between front-line soldiers and their relatives, who were in the rear.

Mail was delivered in both directions: both from the rear to the front, and forward to the rear, while forwarding was free of charge.

Since it was almost impossible to get envelopes on the front line, the fighters folded pieces of paper in a special way - in the shape of a triangle. In many families, such front-line triangles are carefully kept to this day.

Postal stamps on front triangles are a valuable source of information for search engines.

So, when searching for Karaev Amanberdy, who went missing on the territory of Ukraine, thanks to the field mail number, it was possible to confirm the presence of a fighter on the territory of the Lviv region, which contributed to the search for his grave.

If letters from the front in the family are not preserved, electronic databases come to the rescue - OBD-Memorial and Memory of the People: relatives, when searching for missing soldiers, often entered data known to them about the field mail number into the questionnaire.

In April 2017, the regiment received the following letter in the mail:

"Hello! Maybe you can help me find some information about my grandfather. I have such information - Dolotov Alexander Nikolaevich, born in 1912, the village of Minskoe, Kostroma Region. He was drafted by the Kostroma military registration and enlistment office in June 1941. He fought on the Leningrad front with the rank of sergeant, a signalman by profession. He went missing in September 1941 somewhere near the town of Luga. Unfortunately, nothing more is known."

Based on the above initial data, the search was started.

You can get information about the belonging of field mail to military units in the directory posted on the site soldat.ru.

However, there is often a situation where information about the field mail number is not in this directory.

In this case, you can get the necessary data in the following ways:

Through an Internet search, including through, which contains a lot of valuable information;

MOVEMENT NEWS

slide 1

The song "Field mail".

Music: Y. Levitin.

Words: N. Labkovsky.

slide 2

Military field mail - a postal service established in the army in the conditions of military operations.

slide 3

Letters from the fronts of the Great Patriotic War are documents of great power. In the lines smelling of gunpowder - the breath of war, the rudeness of harsh trench everyday life, the tenderness of a soldier's heart, faith in Victory ...

This is a kind of artistic chronicle of the war hard times, an appeal to the heroic past of our ancestors, a call for a merciless struggle against the invaders.

White flocks of letters

They flew to Russia.

Read them with excitement

They knew them by heart.

These letters are still

Do not lose, do not burn,

Like a great shrine

Sons are protected.

slide 4

At the very beginning of the war, the Directorate of Military Field Mail was formed in the Main Directorate of Communications of the Red Army, and departments of military field mail were created at the headquarters of the armies and fronts. Directly in the units, postal field stations were created, which extinguished correspondence with postmarks with the text "USSR Field Mail No. ...".

slide 5

Letters and postcards addressed to the army and thrown into mailbox rear city, first went to the civilian post office, from there to the rear military sorting point. Then, in a mail car, they went to the front-line military post office, from there to the military postal base of the army, from there to the division, regiment, battalion, and, finally, they got to the addressee.

slide 6

In addition to triangle letters, secrets, envelopes and postcards were also issued during the war. Most of them had the text "Death to the German invaders", "Military", sometimes "Letter from the front". The drawings on them were usually on the themes of military operations and heroic labor in the rear.

The post office helped to bring Victory closer.

The field post office wished life to everyone.

A small leaf is folded into a triangle,

Received news with mean lines.

Field mail kept in touch with the rear,

In the war, the post office helped the soldiers.

From the front the triangle waited patiently,

Hands hurriedly opened the letters,

And the eyes were looking for the word "alive" along the lines,

And they wished for an early victory in the war.

How much joy there was, the word was found,

They waited again for news and lived with hope.

Slide 7

In 1941, up to 70 million letters and more than 30 million newspapers were delivered to the active army every month. Noting the great importance of mail for maintaining the spirit of soldiers at the front and workers in the rear, the main newspaper of the country at that time, Pravda, wrote on August 18, 1941:" It is important that the fighter's letter to his relatives, letters and parcels to fighters that come from all over the country, are not delayed due to the fault of signalmen. Each such letter, each such parcel in the name of fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends, in the name of the entire Soviet people infuse new strength into a fighter, inspire him to new feats."

Forwarding correspondence from the front was free of charge. The letters were folded into a simple triangle, which did not require envelopes, which were always in short supply at the front. A triangle envelope is usually a notebook sheet of paper, first folded from right to left, then from left to right. The remaining strip of paper (since the notebook is not square, but rectangular) was inserted like a valve into the triangle. A letter ready to be sent was not sealed - it still had to be read by censorship; a postage stamp was not needed, the address was written on the outside of the sheet.

soldier's letter

It seemed that hell was breathing in the face,
When in thought sitting late,
I stroked the lines that smelled of ashes,
A letter pierced by fragments.

It was written with a wounded hand
On a friendly back.
I saw behind every line
The eyes of soldiers who died in the war.

We instead of them. We have no right
Forget neither their faces nor their names...
To all who died for the Fatherland - honor and glory!
May war be thrice cursed!

A. Sidelnikov

Post office employees worked around the clock to avoid interruptions and delays. However, it also happened that the letters perished along with the postal trains or disappeared in the bag of the postman killed during their delivery.

Every conceivable and unimaginable means was sometimes used to deliver mail. So letters came to Sevastopol by submarines, and they were transported to Leningrad through Lake Ladoga, and after the blockade was broken through the built secret thirty-three-kilometer railway corridor. The field mail did not stop its work, despite hunger, cold and constant shelling. Correspondence was brought on sleds, carts, and even simply carried by hand. During the endless bombing of the capital, employees of the military field post offices had to work in the most severe conditions. The received correspondence was sorted and sorted not only in dugouts and huts, but even simply on the ground or in a clearing in the forest. Very often it was necessary to deliver letters to addressees, crawling under a machine-gun fire, passing through minefields.

Children are invited to make a triangle-letter themselves from a sheet of school notebook.

Slide 8

In the very first weeks of the war, postal workers faced the banal problem of a lack of envelopes. It was then that triangle letters appeared, folk letters, when the sheet with the letter was simply folded several times, and the recipient's address was written on the upper side. These famous symbols of hope and a strong connection between the front and the rear were often mentioned by the authors of works about the Great Patriotic War. The war did not take away people's desire to continue to live and love. They wrote about dreams and hopes that everything will get better, and life will return to its usual course in their letters.

"I wrote what I needed,

And I'll see - I'll tell you.

And now a letter from a soldier

I'll make a triangle.

The first corner is the most important.

I will turn this corner

So that with victory and glory

We have ended the war.

I'll fold the edges of the second one.

Here comes the corner

To return me healthy

On the paternal threshold.

Well, the third, well, the third

In your honor I will lay down soon,

To meet you as before

And call you mine.

So fly with a hot hello

On the sacred porch

Triangular, unbranded

Front Letter.

B. Likharev.

Slide 9

Slide 10

The appearance of a postman in every house was both expected and feared at the same time, because the news could be not only good, but also tragic. Letters in the rear became practically messengers of fate, each of them contained the answer to the most important question - is the one who is expected and loved alive? Such a situation imposed a special responsibility on the bearer of the news, every postman had to experience both joy and sorrow every day, along with his addressees.

“I met Aunt Nastya in the field.

She walked with a mail bag

And the cheerful wind carried:

"The war is over, the war is over."

The women threw a plow on arable land,

Forgetting about bread and horse,

And it became yesterday

Free and doubly joyful.

Aunt Nastya handed out here

field mail envelopes,

And the women wept with happiness,

Converging on the meadow path.

And the kids, lubricating the heels,

Rushed to the remaining corners

And there, among relatives, soldiers

They shared the joy.

And Aunt Nastya

Stitch long

I didn’t go to an empty house,

And a funeral for my son

Which day her heart burned.

Herbs whispered at her feet,

Silence trembled in the field,

And the oak forests loudly echoed:

"The war is over, the war is over."

A.Mishin

slide 11

By the end of 1941, the Soviet military mail was already working as a well-oiled mechanism.

slide 12

slide 13

Photo documents.

Slide 14

Letter from the front: "Hello dear dad and mom" (mp3)

slide 15

But there were other letters as well. Photo document "Notice"

slide 16

Slide 17

Slide 18

Video "Meeting of the Red Army" (09 28)

Slide 19

A moment of silence (metronome)mp3 )

Slide 20

Victory Day is a holiday of spring,

The day of the defeat of a cruel war,

Day of the defeat of violence and evil,

Day of resurrection of love and kindness.

Let's remember those who

I set a goal so that from now on this day

It became a symbol of all the efforts of people

In peace and happiness to raise kids.

Music background 15 8 (folder "WWII")

slide 21

Greeting card. Music background 15 8 (folder "WWII")

If you want to establish the fate of your relative, who died or went missing during the Great Patriotic War, then get ready for a long and laborious work. Do not expect that it is enough to ask a question and someone will tell you in detail about your relative. And there is no magic key to the secret door, behind which stands the box with the inscription "The most detailed information about Sergeant Ivanov I.I. for his great-grandson Edik". Information about a person, if preserved, is scattered across dozens of archives in the smallest, often unrelated fragments. It may turn out that after spending several years searching, you will not learn anything new about your relative. But it is possible that a lucky break will reward you after only a few months of searching.

Below is a simplified search algorithm. It may seem complicated. In fact, everything is much more complicated. Here are described ways to search for information, if it has been preserved somewhere. But the information you needed might not have been preserved at all: the hardest of all wars was going on, not only individual servicemen died - regiments, divisions, armies died, documents disappeared, reports were lost, archives burned ... It is especially difficult (and sometimes impossible) to find out the fate of servicemen , who died or went missing in encirclement in 1941 and in the summer of 1942

In total, the irretrievable losses of the armed forces of the USSR (Red Army, Navy, NKVD) in the Great Patriotic War amounted to 11.944 thousand people. It should immediately be noted that these are not dead, but for various reasons excluded from the lists of units. According to the order of the Deputy People's Commissar of Defense N 023 dated February 4, 1944, irretrievable losses include "those who died in battle, went missing at the front, died from wounds on the battlefield and in medical institutions, died from diseases received at the front, or died at the front from other causes and captured by the enemy. Of this number, 5,059 thousand people went missing. In turn, of the missing, most of them ended up in German captivity (and only less than a third of them survived to liberation), many died on the battlefield, and many of those who ended up in the occupied territory were subsequently re-conscripted into the army. The distribution of irretrievable losses and missing by the years of the war (I remind you that the second number is part of the first) is shown in the table:

Year	Dead Losses (thousand people)		Killed and died from wounds (thousand people)
	Total	Missing
1941	3.137	2.335
1942	3.258	1.515
1943	2.312
1944	1.763
1945
Total	11.944	5.059	9.168

In total, 9,168 thousand servicemen died or died from wounds in the Great Patriotic War, and the total direct human losses of the Soviet Union for all the years of the Great Patriotic War are estimated at 26.6 million people. (The numerical data on losses are taken from the works of Colonel-General G.F. Krivosheev, 1998-2002, which seem to us the most reliable and least politicized of all known estimates of the losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War.)

1. First steps

1.1. Home search

First of all, you need to know exactly the last name, first name, patronymic, year of birth and place of birth. Without this information, it will be very difficult to search.

The place of birth must be indicated in accordance with the administrative-territorial division of the USSR in the prewar years. The correspondence between pre-revolutionary, pre-war and modern administrative-territorial division can be found on the Internet. (Handbook of the administrative division of the USSR in 1939-1945 on the site SOLDIER.ru.)

Usually it is not difficult to find out the time of conscription and the place of residence of the conscript. By place of residence, you can determine which District Military Commissariat (RVK) he was called up to.

Ranks can be determined by the insignia in the surviving photographs. If the rank is unknown, then belonging to the rank and file, command and political composition can be very approximately determined by the education and pre-war biography of the serviceman.

If a medal or order has been preserved that a soldier was awarded during the war, then by the number of the award, you can determine the number of the military unit and even find out a description of the feat or military merits of the recipient.

Be sure to interview the relatives of the soldier. Much time has passed since the end of the war, and the soldier's parents are no longer alive, and his wife, brothers and sisters are very old, much has been forgotten. But when talking with them, some insignificant detail may come up: the name of the area, the presence of letters from the front, words from a long-lost "funeral" ... Write everything down and for each individual fact, be sure to indicate the source: "Smirnova S.I. story 10.05 .2008". You need to write down the source because conflicting information may appear (grandmother said one thing, but another is indicated in the certificate), and you will have to choose a more plausible source. It should be borne in mind that family legends sometimes convey certain events with distortions (something was forgotten, something was mixed up, something the narrator "improved" ...).

It is very important at this stage to determine in the troops of which People's Commissariats (People's Commissariats, or in modern terms - ministries) your relative served: People's Commissariat of Defense (ground forces and aviation), Navy(including coastal units and aviation of the Navy), People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD troops, border units). Cases of different departments are stored in different archives. (Addresses of departmental archives on the site SOLDAT.ru.)

The main task at the first stage should be set - finding out the date of death and the number of the military unit in which the soldier was at least for some time.

1.2. If letters from the front are preserved

All letters from the front were viewed by military censors, the servicemen were warned about this, therefore, usually the letters did not indicate the names and numbers of military units, the names of settlements, etc.

The first thing to determine is the number of the Field Post Station (PPS or "field mail"). By the PPP number it is often possible to determine room military unit. ("Handbook of field postal stations of the Red Army in 1941-1945", "Handbook of military units - field mails of the Red Army in 1943-1945" on the SOLDIER.ru website. ) It should be borne in mind that in this case it is not always possible to determine a specific unit (regiment, battalion, company) as part of a military unit. ("Recommendations" on the website SOLDAT.ru. )

Until September 5, 1942, the address of a military unit usually consisted of the number of the PPS and the numbers of specific military units served by this PPS (regiment, battalion, company, platoon). After September 5, 1942, the actual numbers of military units were not indicated in the address, and instead of them, within each specific PPS, conditional numbers of addressees were introduced. Such conditional numbers could include from two to five or six characters (letters and numbers). It is impossible to determine the actual number of the military unit by the conditional number of the addressee. In this case, only the number of the division or army can be determined by the PPS number, and the number of the regiment, battalion, company will remain unknown, because. each army had its own unit coding system.

In addition to the PPP number, the stamp (in the center) has the date the letter was registered at the PPP (actually the date the letter was sent) - it will also come in handy in further searches. The text of the letter may contain information about the rank of a serviceman, about his military specialty, about rewarding, about belonging to an ordinary, junior command (sergeant), command (officer) or political composition, etc.

2. Internet search

2.1. United data bank "Memorial"

2.1.1. The largest resource on the Internet is the official website of the Ministry of Defense "Joint data bank "Memorial"". The data bank was created on the basis of documents stored in TsAMO: reports of irretrievable losses, journals of those who died in hospitals, alphabetical lists of burials, German personal cards for prisoners of war, post-war lists of those who did not return from the war, etc. Currently (2008) the site works in test mode. The site can be searched by last name, place of conscription, year of birth and some others. keywords. Can view scans source documents, in which the found person is mentioned.

When searching, you should also check consonant surnames and first names, especially if the surname is poorly perceived by ear - with repeated rewriting, the surname could be distorted. The operator could also make a mistake when entering handwritten information into the computer.

In some cases, there are several documents per soldier, for example: a report on irretrievable losses, a nominal list of those who died from wounds, an alphabetical list of those who died in a hospital, a military burial record card, etc. And of course, very often there are no documents for a serviceman - this mainly refers to those missing in the initial period of the war.

2.2.1. In addition to the site of the OBD "Memorial", there are several available databases on the Internet with a search by surnames (Page of links on the site SOLDIER.en).

2.2.2. Regardless of the search results on the "OBD Memorial" website and databases, it is necessary to search in several search engines on the Internet, specifying known information about the relative as the search string. Even search system will tell you something interesting on your request, you should repeat the search for various combinations of words, check synonyms and possible abbreviations of terms, names, names.

2.2.3. You should definitely visit genealogical and military-historical sites and forums, browse the catalogs of sections of military literature on the sites electronic libraries. Read the memoirs of soldiers and officers found on the Internet who served on the same sector of the front as your relative, as well as descriptions of the military operations of the front, army, division in which he served. This will help you a lot in your future work. . And it’s just useful to know about the everyday life of that big war.

2.2.4. You should not completely trust the information received from the Internet - often no one is responsible for its reliability, so always try to check the facts obtained from other sources. If verification fails, then make a note or just remember which of the information was obtained from an unverified source. In the future, you will often come across information that is unlikely, unreliable, doubtful, or even, most likely, false. For example, very soon you will have a list of namesakes, a wanted relative, who have some biography facts that match the ones you need. You don’t need to throw anything away, but be sure to indicate the source from which you received it for each new fact - maybe in a year you will have new information that will make you evaluate the information collected in a new way.

2.2.5. If right now you have a desire to ask your question at the military-historical forum, do not rush. To get started, read the posts on this forum in recent weeks. It may turn out that such questions have already been asked more than once, and regular forum visitors have already answered them in detail - in this case, your question will cause irritation. In addition, each forum has its own rules and traditions, and if you want to get a friendly answer, then try not to violate the norms of behavior adopted on the forum. Usually, the first time you post to a forum, you should introduce yourself. And don't forget to include your address. Email for those who want to reply to you by letter.

2.3. Books of Memory

2.3.1. In many regions of the country, Books of Memory have been issued, which contain alphabetical lists of the inhabitants of the region who died or went missing during the Great Patriotic War. Books of Memory are multi-volume publications, they can be found in the regional library and in the military registration and enlistment offices of the region, but it is difficult to find them outside the region. In some regions of the country, in addition to the regional Book of Memory, Books of Memory of individual regions have been issued. Some Books are available in electronic versions on the Internet. Since the publications of different territories, regions, republics and districts were prepared by different editorial teams, the set of personal information and design of different publications are different. As a rule, military personnel born or drafted into the army in this region are indicated in the Books of Memory of the Regions. Both Books of Memory should be checked: the one published at the place of birth and the one published at the place of conscription of the serviceman. (Links to electronic versions Books of Memory on the Internet on the site SOLDIER.ru.)

In the Books of Memory of some regions where hostilities took place, there is information about the servicemen who died and were buried in the region. If you know in which region the serviceman died, you need to check the Memory Book of the corresponding region.

2.3.2. A large database of dead servicemen is available at the museum on Poklonnaya Gora in Moscow, and museum staff provide information both in person and by phone, but the database installed in the museum is abbreviated (contains only last name, first name, patronymic and year of birth), and the complete database, funded by public funds, is now privately owned and virtually inaccessible. In addition, with the appearance of the OBD Memorial website on the Internet, both databases can be considered outdated.

2.3.3. If you yourself can not get access to the necessary Books of Memory, then you can ask to check the book of the desired area on an Internet forum with military history or genealogical topics. In addition, many cities have their own websites on the Internet, and most of these sites have their own regional forums. You can ask a question or make a request on such a forum, and you will most likely be given advice or a hint, and if the settlement is small, then you may be asked some question in the military enlistment office or museum.

It should be borne in mind that there are also errors in the Books of Memory, their number depends on the conscientiousness of the editorial team.

3. Getting information from the archive

3.1. On the personal account of the dead and missing military personnel

3.1.1. This subsection provides brief information about the personal account of servicemen who died and went missing during the Great Patriotic War. Basic knowledge of record keeping is essential for further work with archival documents.

3.1.2. It should be noted that during the war, the accounting of dead servicemen was organized quite clearly (as far as it was possible in the conditions of war). With an interval of 10 days (sometimes less often), each military unit of the Active Army sent a list of irretrievable losses to the higher headquarters - "Report on irretrievable losses ...". In this report, for each deceased soldier, the following was indicated: last name, first name, patronymic, year of birth, rank, position, date and place of death, place of burial, conscription office, address of residence and names of parents or wife. Reports from various units were collected at the Directorate for Manning the Troops of the General Staff of the Red Army (later - at the Central Loss Bureau of the Red Army). Similar reports were submitted by hospitals about military personnel who died from wounds and diseases.

After the war, these reports were transferred to TsAMO, and on their basis a file of irretrievable losses was compiled. Information from the report of the military unit was transferred to the personal card of the serviceman, the number of the military unit and the number under which this report was taken into account were indicated in the card.

3.1.3. A notice of the death of a serviceman was sent by the headquarters of the unit in which the deceased served, as a rule, to the draft board. The military registration and enlistment office issued a duplicate of the notice, which was sent to relatives, and on its basis a pension was subsequently issued. The original notices remained in storage at the military registration and enlistment office. The original notice had a round seal and a corner stamp with the name of the military unit or its conditional five-digit number. Some of the notices were sent by the headquarters of the military units directly to the relatives, bypassing the military registration and enlistment office, which was a violation of the established procedure. Part of the notices of post-war issuance was issued by the district military registration and enlistment offices on the proposal of the Central Bureau of Losses. All notices issued by the military registration and enlistment offices bore the seal and details of the military registration and enlistment office, and the number of the military unit, as a rule, was not given.

The notice of the death of a serviceman indicated: the name of the unit, rank, position, date and place of death of the serviceman and the place of burial. (Image of a notice of the death of a serviceman on the SOLDIER website.en.)

3.1.4. Two ways of indicating the names of military units in open (unclassified) correspondence should be distinguished:

a) in the period 1941-42. the actual name of the unit was indicated in the documents - for example, 1254 rifle regiment (sometimes indicating the division number);

b) in the period 1943-45. the conditional name of the military unit was indicated - for example, "military unit 57950", which corresponded to the same 1254 sp. Five-digit numbers were assigned to NPO units, and four-digit numbers were assigned to NKVD units.

3.1.5. A serviceman who was absent from the unit for an unknown reason was considered missing, and the search for him within 15 days did not yield any results. Information about the missing was also transmitted to the higher headquarters, and a notice of the missing was sent to relatives. In this case, the notice of the missing serviceman indicated the name of the military unit, the date and place of the missing serviceman.

Most of the servicemen who are listed as missing died during the retreat, or during reconnaissance in battle, or in the environment, i.e. in cases where the battlefield was left behind by the enemy. It was difficult to witness their death for various reasons. Also missing were:

- Soldiers taken prisoner

- deserters,

- business travelers who did not arrive at their destination,

- scouts who did not return from the mission,

- the personnel of entire units and subunits in the event that they were defeated and there were no commanders left who could reliably report to the authorities about specific types of losses.

However, the reason for the absence of a serviceman could be not only his death. For example, a soldier who lagged behind a unit on the march could be included in another military unit, in which he then continued to fight. The wounded from the battlefield could be evacuated by soldiers of another unit and sent directly to the hospital. There are cases when relatives during the war received several notices ("funeral"), and the person turned out to be alive.

3.1.6. In those cases when no information about irretrievable losses was received from the military unit to the higher headquarters (for example, when the unit or its headquarters died in the environment, the loss of documents), the notification to relatives could not be sent, because. the lists of the military personnel of the unit were among the lost headquarters documents.

3.1.7. After the end of the war, the district military commissariats carried out work to collect information about servicemen who had not returned from the war (household survey). In addition, the relatives of a serviceman who did not return from the war could, on their own initiative, draw up a “Questionnaire for a non-returning from war” at the military registration and enlistment office.

On the basis of information from the military registration and enlistment offices, the card file of losses was replenished with cards compiled based on the results of a survey of relatives. Such cards could contain the entry "correspondence was interrupted in December 1942", and the number of the military unit was usually absent. If the number of the military unit is indicated in the card drawn up on the basis of a report from the military registration and enlistment office, then it should be treated as probable, presumptive. The date of the disappearance of a serviceman in this case was usually set by the military commissar by adding three to six months to the date of the last letter. The directive of the MVS of the USSR recommended that the district military commissars set the date of missing according to the following rules:

1) if the relatives of a serviceman who did not return from the war lived in the non-occupied territory, then three months should be added to the date of the last letter received,

2) if the relatives of a soldier who did not return from the war remained in the occupied territory during the war, then three months should be added to the date of liberation of the territory.

Household survey sheets and questionnaires are also stored in TsAMO (department 9), and they may contain information that is not in the card. When filling out the card, not all the information given in the household survey sheet was usually entered into it. or questionnaire, since there was no opportunity to verify the information recorded from the words of relatives. Therefore, if it is known that the family of a serviceman received letters from him from the front, but later these letters were lost, then some information from these letters (the number of the teaching staff, the date of the letter) may be in the records of the door-to-door survey. When answering an inquiry about the fate of a serviceman, archive workers are not able to find the statements of the door-to-door survey. You will have to look for them on your own, but, most likely, with a personal visit to the archive. The number of the RVC report with the year indicated on the back of the personal card. After the appearance on the Internet of the website of the OBD "Memorial", it became possible to conduct an independent search for source documents.

3.2. Brief information about the archives

Most of the documents relating to the period of the Great Patriotic War are stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO). Below, the search for military personnel of the People's Commissariat of Defense (NPO) will be mainly described and, accordingly, references will be made to the TsAMO archive, since it is in it that the archives of the People's Commissariat of Defense (and then the Ministry of Defense) are stored from June 22, 1941 to the eighties. (Addresses of departmental archives on the site SOLDAT.ru.)

The card index of the dead and missing servicemen of the NPO during the years of the Great Patriotic War is stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO). Similar loss files are available in:

a) the Central Naval Archive in Gatchina - for the personnel of the fleet, coastal service and aviation of the Navy,

b) the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow - for persons who served in the bodies, formations and units of the NKVD,

c) the archive of the Federal Border Service of the FSB of the Russian Federation in the city of Pushkino, Moscow Region - for border guards.

In addition to the listed archives, the necessary documentation may be in the state regional archives and departmental archives.

Part of the information can be obtained on the OBD Memorial website

To obtain information about the fate of a serviceman, it is necessary to send a request to TsAMO (or to other archives indicated above), in which briefly indicate the known information about the serviceman. It is also recommended to include a postal envelope with a stamp and your home address in the envelope to expedite the response. ( Mailing address TsAMO and a sample application on the SOLDIER.ru website.)

If the military rank of a serviceman is unknown or there is reason to believe that he could have been awarded an officer rank, then in the application to TsAMO you should write "Please check the personal file cabinets and file cabinets of losses of the 6th, 9th, 11th TsAMO departments" (in departments 6, 9 , 11 file cabinets are maintained for political, private and sergeant, officer corps, respectively).

It is recommended to simultaneously send an application in the same letter with a request to "Clarify the awards" and indicate the surname, name, patronymic, year and place of birth of the serviceman. TsAMO has a card file of all awarded Red Army servicemen, and it may turn out that the serviceman you are looking for was awarded a medal or order. (The image of the "Account card of the awarded" and the application form on the SOLDIER.ru website.)

Due to the insufficient funding of the archive, the answer from it may come by mail in 6-12 months, therefore, if possible, it is better to visit the archive in person. (TsAMO address on SOLDAT.ru website.) You can also make a request at the military commissariat, in which case the request to the archive will be issued on the form of the military commissariat with the signature of the military commissar and the seal.

Since 2007, only citizens of the Russian Federation have been allowed to enter TsAMO - this is the instruction of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which apparently forgot that natives of all the republics of the USSR fought and died in the war.

3.4. Received a response from TsAMO. Response Analysis

Thus, a letter from TsAMO (or the result of an independent search in the Memorial OBD) can contain 4 possible answers:

1) A report on the death of a serviceman indicating the number of the military unit, the date and place of death, rank and place of burial.

2) A report of a missing serviceman, indicating the number of the military unit, date and place of loss.

3) A report of a missing serviceman, compiled on the basis of a survey of relatives, with incomplete, unverified or inaccurate information.

4) Reporting the absence of information about the serviceman in the loss card file.

If you are lucky, and the answer from TsAMO contains the name of the military unit, then you can proceed to clarify the combat path of the serviceman (see below)

If you are VERY lucky, and in the card index of the awarded TsAMO there was a registration card for your relative, and an extract from it was sent to you in the response of the archive, then you should familiarize yourself with the award sheet in the same TsAMO, which contains short description feat or merit of the awarded. The description of work in TsAMO is given below, and the description of the search in the military registration and enlistment office can be skipped.

If, however, it was not possible to establish the number of the military unit in which your relative served, then you will have to continue the search in the military registration and enlistment office and in other departmental archives. More on this below.

4. Search for information on the place of conscription

4.1. Brief information about the organization of work in the RVC for the staffing of the Active Army

4.1.1. In order to correctly make a request to the district military registration and enlistment office (RVK), you should familiarize yourself with the organization of the work of the RVC on staffing the Active Army (DA).

4.1.2. RVC carried out the call and mobilization of citizens, as well as their distribution to duty stations.

Citizens drafted into the army (that is, those who had not previously served) could be sent

- to a reserve or training regiment or brigade stationed at that time near the place of conscription,

- to the military unit formed in the area.

Citizens mobilized from the reserve (i.e., already serving in the army) could be sent immediately to the front as part of marching companies or battalions.

4.1.3. Marching companies (battalions) were usually not sent directly to the combat unit, but first arrived at the army or front transit point (PP) or at the army or front reserve rifle regiment (or reserve rifle brigade).

4.1.4. Newly formed, reorganized or understaffed military units were sent to the front and participated in hostilities under their own numbers.

4.1.5. Reserve regiments and brigades accepted unprepared military contingent, carried out initial military training and sent military personnel to the front or to educational institutions. Sending to the front was usually carried out as part of marching companies or battalions. It is necessary to distinguish between permanent and variable composition of spare military units. The permanent composition included military personnel who ensured the functioning of the military unit: regimental headquarters, headquarters, commanders of battalions, companies and platoons, employees of the medical unit, a separate communications company, etc. The variable composition included military personnel enlisted in the spare part for military training. The period of stay in spare parts of variable composition ranged from several weeks to several months.

4.1.6. In the military enlistment office of conscription for each conscript (that is, for the first time called up and who had not previously served in the army), a "Conscription card" was drawn up. It contained information about the conscript, the results of a medical examination and information about the parents. On its reverse side, the penultimate paragraph contains the number of the draft team and the date the team was sent. (Image of the recruiting card on the SOLDIER website.en.)

4.1.7. A conscripted reserve is a person who has completed active military service in the Red Army and the RKVMF, and is in the reserve of category 1 or 2. Upon arrival at the RVC at the place of residence from service (or for other reasons), a “Regular Service Card” was issued, in which there was no information about relatives, medical data was briefly given, the dates of issue of the mobilization order and the place of registration, the conditional number of the draft team were indicated , to which the person liable for military service was assigned when mobilization was announced. Also, information about the issuance of a military ID, place of work, position, home address was entered into the registration card. The second copy of the registration card was at the headquarters of the unit to which the citizen was assigned. (The image of the registration card of a person liable for military service on the SOLDIER website.en.)

Under the numbers of draft teams, the already existing personnel formations and their parts were specially encrypted, which, when mobilized, were supposed to deploy to the number of wartime states due to the call-up of military reserve assigned to them. Accordingly, lists of such recruiting teams may be preserved in the RVC, and in different RVC for the same regular military unit, the number of the draft team was the same, because. the personnel military unit, where specific conscripts followed, is the same.

4.1.8. In addition to the above documents, each RVC kept the following journals:

- Alphabetical books drafted into the Soviet Army during the Great Patriotic War...,

- Alphabetical books for registering the dead...,

- Nominal lists of privates and sergeants, recorded as dead and missing ...

The above "Alphabetical books called up to the Soviet Army ..." were compiled on the basis of Conscription cards and Registration cards of a person liable for military service, but they have a much smaller set of information compared to the original documents. In many military registration and enlistment offices, draft cards and registration cards were destroyed after the expiration of the storage period. In some military registration and enlistment offices these documents are still kept.

4.1.9. When sending a draft team, the military registration and enlistment office compiled a "Nominal list for the draft team." In addition to the nominal list of military personnel, it contains the number of the military unit (conditional - "military unit N 1234", or valid - "333 s.d.") and the address of this unit. (Image of the name list per team on the SOLDIER website.en.) In many military registration and enlistment offices, "Name lists ..." were destroyed after the expiration of the storage period. In some military registration and enlistment offices they are still kept.

4.2. Search for information in the military registration and enlistment office

4.2.1. If the answer from the archive does not indicate the number of the military unit or if there is no information about the serviceman in the archive, then you will have to continue the search at the military registration and enlistment office at the place of conscription. You can send an application to the military registration and enlistment office by mail or appear in person. The latter is, of course, preferable. If the exact address of the military enlistment office is unknown, then only the name of the city can be written on the envelope (without specifying the street and house), and in the column "To" write: "Rayvoenokat" - the letter will reach. The application must include all known information about the serviceman. (Sample application to the RVC and postal codes on the SOLDIER website.en.)

Since registration documents with different names were drawn up for conscripts and those mobilized, and it is not always known whether the wanted person served in the army before the war, it is recommended to ask for copies of both documents in the application to the RVC: the Conscription card and the Registration card of the person liable for military service.

4.2.2. If the response received from the RVC contains the conditional number of the military unit, then you need to determine the actual number. ("Directory of conditional names of military units (institutions) in 1939-1943" and "Directory of military units - field mails of the Red Army in 1943-1945" on the site SOLDAT.ru.)

4.2.3. It should be recalled that the archives of the military commissariats located in the temporarily occupied territories in the western regions and republics of the Soviet Union could be lost.

4.2.4. The search for information about the personnel and direction of marching companies and battalions is very difficult, because. in the process of moving to the front line, marching units could be redirected at transit points (PP) located along the route, or re-staffed in reserve rifle regiments and brigades of armies and fronts. The marching companies that arrived at the combat unit were sometimes, due to circumstances, immediately put into battle without being properly enrolled in the unit's staff.

4.3. Spare parts and military units of local formation

4.3.1. If it is not possible to find out at the recruiting office where the conscript was sent, then the search should be continued in the funds spare and training units stationed at that time near the settlement of the call. Usually they were sent to train previously non-serving recruits. Further search for information should be made in the documents of these parts. at TsAMO. (Handbook "Dislocation of spare and training units" on the SOLDIER.ru website.)