Who doesn't know this detective story, I refer you to the book by Igor Ivanovich Ivlev “And in response there is silence”, which can be found on the Internet completely free of charge
Among other things, the issue is discussed there mass extinction from the USSR military registration and enlistment offices of personal files of privates and sergeants who went to the front of the Second World War. It is commonly accepted that they did not exist. It has now been proven that they were, according to I.I. Ivlev they were sent to TsAMO RF in the late 1940s and early 1950s where they disappeared...
Many questions arise - what did these cases look like? Some of these cases were discovered in one of the military registration and enlistment offices Arkhangelsk region during the work of I.I. Ivlev’s search group there. If the files were sent to Podolsk, then HOW was such a huge amount of paper destroyed? How were pension accruals carried out without these files?
The files of the Krasno-Pekhorsky RVK (military registration and enlistment office of the Krasno-Pekhorsky (Kalinin) district disbanded in 1957, which I found in the Podolsk Military Commissariat of the Moscow Region, most territory of which became part of the Podolsk region of the Moscow Region) - these are precisely personal files, but please note - these personal files were conducted until 1947 and contained large number information related to pensions for the families of deceased military personnel.
This is a rare find! I worked in many military registration and enlistment offices and have never seen such personal files there, but here a small stack of such files was completely accidentally preserved in the Podolsk military registration and enlistment office...
Sergeant Mezin was killed on November 14, 1942. Please note that the military registration and enlistment office does not notify about this military unit, and the financial department of the Moscow Regional Military Commissariat. Notice dated 12/10/1942
The military registration and enlistment office issues notices like this - at the top with a tear-off spine. And below. How they differ from each other is not clear. Date 12/22/1942
The soldier died, the pension was calculated.
Calculated pension. 1942
The soldier died, his wife no longer lives at her old address.
a href="http://gallery.ru/watch?ph=bcaV-gczBA " target="_blank">
Mezin's wife Zenaida Evgenevna works as a police officer, no children, lives alone, house 73 sq. 8, according to neighbors Zemkina Yelezoveta Ivanovna
Moreover, along with the funeral, they immediately receive a notification for the issuance of a pension. True, we also had to look for relatives.
Separately, the military registration and enlistment office decides to whom exactly the pension is issued.
An interesting thing - an extract from the order of the Main Directorate of Formation and Recruitment for a SERGEANT. In the OBD, such orders are given only for officers... it turns out that such orders were for non-commissioned officers and enlisted personnel? For all 20 million? Where are they? Very interesting.
Conclusion: it is clear that there were millions of such cases... they could greatly help in establishing the fate of military personnel and, in fact, they have a place in the OBD. Where are they? Maybe in the archives of Social Security or regional pension funds??
In the 1990s, a number of documents Soviet era, previously classified as “top secret”, began to be made public, however, having come to their senses, the authorities again closed access to them. Apparently, many secrets of the USSR will remain inaccessible.
Classified as "top secret"
The classification of secrecy is imposed for two reasons. First and foremost, most of the documents stored in the archives are state secrets. The second reason is related to materials related to famous personalities past, whose heirs do not want the details of their lives made public.
In 1918, something happened that today does not allow us to fully familiarize ourselves with the documents of the Soviet past. That year, Lenin received a message in which he was informed how Red Army soldiers were indiscriminately destroying manuscripts and correspondence famous writers. The leader immediately called the publicist Bonch-Bruevich with a request to write a brochure entitled “Save the Archives.” The brochure, which sold 50 thousand copies, bore fruit.
However, very soon Soviet officials realized that it was important not only to preserve the archives, but also to limit the access of ordinary citizens to them due to the confidentiality of the information contained in some sources.
In 1938, control of all archival files came under the jurisdiction of the NKVD of the USSR, which classified a huge amount of information, numbering tens of thousands of cases. Since 1946, the powers of this department were received by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, and since 1995 - by the FSB of Russia. Since 2016, all archives have been reassigned directly to the President of Russia.
Stalin's affairs
Despite the fact that many documents Stalin era have long been declassified, some of them are still hidden away from prying eyes in the Russian state archive socio-political history. In particular, about 200 cases from the Stalin Foundation are classified as secret. Of considerable interest to researchers are the cases of Yezhov and Beria, which were published only in parts, and complete information in the cases of executioners who became enemies of the people, there are still no executioners.
Today, many Russians are requesting investigative files of illegally repressed citizens stored in the archives of the FSB and GARF. Access to the investigative files of repressed persons is permitted by law for relatives, as well as for other interested parties. True, the latter can receive the required documents only after the expiration of 75 years from the date of the verdict. Often, visitors to archives receive defective copies, in particular, with the names of NKVD officers blacked out.
Some researchers are confident that the NKVD files will never be declassified in full. In March 2014, the interdepartmental Commission for the Protection of State Secrets extended the secrecy period for documents of the Cheka-KGB for the years 1917-1991 for the next 30 years. This decision also included a large array of documents relating to the Great Terror of 1937-1938, which were extremely in demand by historians and relatives of victims of repression.
WWII Archives
Today, the Great Period still hides many secrets. Patriotic War. For example, there is still no publicly available summary work on the operations of the Red Army during the war with maps attached. Since the publication of the collection of archival materials “1941” in 1998, new original documents have been published in very measured doses. Moreover, researchers do not even have the right to familiarize themselves with the names of cases in the secret storage inventories.
Historian Igor Ievlev notes in this regard: “Apparently, researchers have already approached a barrier, beyond which, if overcome, completely inconvenient and, probably, even shameful and disgraceful pages can open.” real story countries".
Also modern historians cannot get acquainted with the original documents recording the number of conscripts and mobilized in wartime and are still forced to rely on data from saved summoning books - a secondary source. Unfortunately, the draft cards of recruits, the registration cards of those liable for military service in the reserve and the rank and file of the Red Army were almost all destroyed.
Not long ago, on the forum of one of the sites dedicated to the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, one of the readers shared interesting information. According to him, in one of the conversations, a former employee of the military registration and enlistment office told him long history about the complete destruction in 1953 after the death of Stalin of all service records and other primary documents for the rank and file from pre-war times until the end of the war.
What is the reason for the desire of the USSR leadership to hide data relating to mobilization on the eve of and during the Second World War? Researchers are sure: in order to hide real losses USSR in the first months of the war.
KGB Archives
The KGB in the USSR, like the CIA in the USA, is an intelligence service that, during its existence, has carried out huge amount secret operations around the world. Any state security officer will confirm that business papers The KGB is rarely declassified in its original form. They are first “cleansed”, removing information that the department does not want to make public for one reason or another.
Almost all the secrets known today Soviet intelligence services were published in London in 1996 thanks to former employee archive department of the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR to Vasily Mitrokhin. Archive volume classified materials The KGB, which Mitrokhin handed over to Great Britain, amounted to 25 thousand pages.
The published materials contain information that could hardly be published in Russia in the foreseeable future. In particular, it was brought to public attention how, from 1959 to 1972, the KGB collected information about American power plants, dams, oil pipelines and other infrastructure in preparation for an operation that could lead to a disruption in the power supply of all of New York.
It contains information detailing the KGB's plans to secretly acquire three American banks in Northern California as part of a covert operation designed to obtain information about high-tech companies in the region. The banks were not chosen by chance, since all of them had previously provided loans to corporations of interest to the KGB. The figurehead in whose name the banks were bought was supposed to be a Singaporean businessman, but the American intelligence services managed to figure out the KGB's plans.
Even these two facts are quite enough to understand why the KGB carefully guards its secrets.
Quite personally
Many personal funds related to the lives of famous people are also closed to the general public. Much that should not be known is hidden in Stalin’s personal archive. But at least the names of these materials are known. Here there are, in particular, outgoing cipher telegrams from Stalin for the period of the 1930s, correspondence of the Secretary General with the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR and the Ministry of the Armed Forces of the USSR for the 1920–1950s, letters from citizens and foreigners addressed to Stalin, documents about Molotov's trip to London and Washington in 1942.
Other than that, we'll probably never know the details. personal life Marina Vladi and Vladimir Vysotsky. Former Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov will not reveal state secrets to us, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn will not tell us about his innermost thoughts. Personal archives public figures most often they are closed from public access by their heirs.
For example, the personal fund of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, stored in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, is in closed access, because the heir - the writer’s wife Natalya Dmitrievna - decides for herself whether to make the documents public or not. She motivated her decision by the fact that documents often contain poems by Solzhenitsyn that are not particularly good, and she would not want others to know about this.
Difficulties of declassification
In 1991, the Presidential Archive was formed Russian Federation, which combined documents from the former archives of USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, and later the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin. During the first 10 years of the foundation’s existence, many materials were declassified, but in the early 2000s this process was suspended, and documents that had already been made public were classified again.
The head of Rosarkhiv, Andrei Artizov, noted in one of his interviews: “We declassify documents in accordance with our national interests. There is a declassification plan. To make a decision on declassification, three or four experts with knowledge are needed foreign languages, historical context, legislation on state secrets."
What are the country's leaders afraid of when declassifying documents, many of which have already crossed the half-century mark? Researchers cite a number of reasons: Among them, for example, is the very difficult issue of cooperation between the USSR and Nazi Germany on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, reflected in numerous documents.
Other reasons include: the real scale of repression Stalin's power against his people; destabilization of the world situation by the USSR; facts that destroy the myth about economic assistance USSR to other states; squandering public funds to bribe governments of third world countries in order to obtain support from the UN.
In fact, all prohibited materials can be summarized into two main categories: documents that present the Soviet regime in an extremely negative light, and documents that in any way relate to the ancestors of modern politicians, which we would like to keep silent about. This is understandable, since both can seriously damage one’s reputation modern Russia- the legal successor of the USSR - in the eyes of the whole world.
Previously, a description of the activities of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation was given, however, due to increased interest readers to materials about military archives, it was decided to continue this topic, focusing on certain areas of search. Understanding storage and use features archival documents is a great help in compiling a pedigree and family tree.
Introductory information
The personal files of officers are rightfully considered a significant source of genealogical information. Soviet army, which until 1946 was called the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army. Without taking this information into account, it is very difficult to compile family tree your family as accurately as possible.
From the point of view, the cases of officers for the period from 1930 to 1970 are of greatest interest, namely:
- information about commanders, participants in the Great Patriotic War, who received ranks before the war;
- personal files of officers who received ranks in the post-war period;
- materials about reserve officers who did not have a special military education, but received ranks after military training.
Storage locations
Most of the information is located in district and city military registration and enlistment offices - according to the military registration of officers. However, due to the expiration of storage periods, much of the information from early Soviet period were transferred to the 5th department, located in the Moscow region (Podolsk). This is the main archive of the Second World War, a search by name in which can give significant results.
The Naval Archive (Gatchina, Leningrad Region) stores personal files of fleet officers. Some information about officers The Red Army and the Ministry (Commissariat) of Internal Affairs can be found in the Moscow Russian State Military Archive.
To draw up a family tree of your family means to take into account all directions of the search, and it is not possible to find an impressive part of the personal files of officers from the period of the Great Patriotic War. First of all, this applies to young officers who received ranks after completing courses in an accelerated program. The lack of combat experience often became the reason for the death of still young commanders, and the intense work schedule of the headquarters did not always allow materials to be transferred to the archive in a timely manner. But you can still try to find information on this category of officers in the 11th department of TsAMO, where it is presented in the form of service records; the WWII archive, a search by the officer’s surname in combination with other sources often lead researchers to genealogical discoveries. You just need to remember that biographical data in this institution is issued for review only in the personal presence of the applicant or trustee and upon provision of documents confirming relationship.
Brief description of your personal file
The instructions required that personal files be drawn up in 2 copies. These materials contain detailed information both about the officer himself and about his relatives. The photograph must be endorsed by the immediate superior and the seal of the military unit. The documents also included autobiographical information, a service record, and brief information about his wife, children and parents. All these materials undoubtedly help to create a family tree for your family. The officer's personal number was stamped directly on track record. In addition, this list dated and outlined all the main stages of service: information about birth, social and party affiliation, information about conscription or training in a military institution, about the assignment of ranks, as well as about awards, injuries, penalties and incentives.
When using materials from the site, a direct link to the source is required.
In the 1990s, a number of Soviet-era documents that had previously been classified as “top secret” began to be made public, but the authorities, having come to their senses, again closed access to them. Apparently, many secrets of the USSR will remain inaccessible.
Classified as "top secret"
The classification of secrecy is imposed for two reasons. First and foremost, most of the documents stored in the archives are state secrets. The second reason is related to materials concerning famous personalities of the past, whose heirs do not want the details of their lives to be made public. In 1918, something happened that today does not allow us to fully familiarize ourselves with the documents of the Soviet past. That year, Lenin received a message informing him how Red Army soldiers were indiscriminately destroying manuscripts and correspondence of famous writers. The leader immediately called the publicist Bonch-Bruevich with a request to write a brochure entitled “Save the Archives.” The brochure, which sold 50 thousand copies, bore fruit. However, very soon Soviet officials realized that it was important not only to preserve the archives, but also to limit the access of ordinary citizens to them due to the confidentiality of the information contained in some sources. In 1938, the management of all archival affairs came under the jurisdiction of the NKVD of the USSR, which classified a huge amount of information, numbering tens of thousands of files. Since 1946, the powers of this department were received by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, and since 1995 - by the FSB of Russia. Since 2016, all archives have been reassigned directly to the President of Russia.
Stalin's affairs
Despite the fact that many documents from the Stalin era have long been declassified, some of them are still hidden away from prying eyes in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. In particular, about 200 cases from the Stalin Foundation are classified as secret. Of considerable interest to researchers are the cases of Yezhov and Beria, which were published only in parts, and there is still no complete information on the cases of the executioners who became enemies of the people. Today, many Russians are requesting investigative files of illegally repressed citizens stored in the archives of the FSB and GARF. Access to the investigative files of repressed persons is permitted by law for relatives, as well as for other interested parties. True, the latter can receive the required documents only after the expiration of 75 years from the date of the verdict. Often, visitors to archives receive defective copies, in particular, with the names of NKVD officers blacked out. Some researchers are confident that the NKVD files will never be declassified in full. In March 2014, the interdepartmental Commission for the Protection of State Secrets extended the secrecy period for documents of the Cheka-KGB for the years 1917-1991 for the next 30 years. This decision also included a large array of documents relating to the Great Terror of 1937-1938, which were extremely in demand by historians and relatives of victims of repression.WWII Archives
The period of the Great Patriotic War still hides many secrets today. For example, there is still no publicly available summary work on the operations of the Red Army during the war with maps attached. Since the publication of the collection of archival materials “1941” in 1998, new original documents have been published in very measured doses. Moreover, researchers do not even have the right to familiarize themselves with the names of cases in the secret storage inventories. Historian Igor Ievlev notes in this regard: “Apparently, researchers have already approached a barrier behind which, if overcome, completely inconvenient and, probably, even shameful and disgraceful pages of the real history of the country can open.” Also, modern historians cannot familiarize themselves with the original documents recording the number of conscripts and mobilized in wartime and are still forced to rely on data from preserved conscription books - a secondary source. Unfortunately, the draft cards of recruits, the registration cards of those liable for military service in the reserve and the rank and file of the Red Army were almost all destroyed. Not long ago, on the forum of one of the sites dedicated to soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, one of the readers shared interesting information. According to him, in one of the conversations, a former employee of the military registration and enlistment office told him a long-standing story about the complete destruction in 1953 after the death of Stalin of all service records and other primary documents for the rank and file from pre-war times until the end of the war. What is the reason for the desire of the USSR leadership to hide data relating to mobilization on the eve of and during the Second World War? Researchers are sure: in order to hide the real losses of the USSR in the first months of the war.KGB Archives
The KGB in the USSR, like the CIA in the USA, is an intelligence service that, during its existence, has conducted a huge number of secret operations around the world. Any state security officer will confirm that KGB business papers are rarely declassified in their original form. They are first “cleansed”, removing information that the department does not want to make public for one reason or another. Almost all the currently known secrets of the Soviet intelligence services were published in London in 1996 thanks to a former employee of the archive department of the First Main Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, Vasily Mitrokhin. The volume of the archive of secret KGB materials that Mitrokhin transferred to Great Britain was 25 thousand pages. The published materials contain information that could hardly be published in Russia in the foreseeable future. In particular, it was brought to public attention how, from 1959 to 1972, the KGB collected information about American power plants, dams, oil pipelines and other infrastructure in preparation for an operation that could lead to a disruption in the power supply of all of New York. It contains information detailing the KGB's plans to secretly acquire three American banks in Northern California as part of a covert operation designed to obtain information about high-tech companies in the region. The banks were not chosen by chance, since all of them had previously provided loans to corporations of interest to the KGB. The figurehead in whose name the banks were bought was supposed to be a Singaporean businessman, but the American intelligence services managed to figure out the KGB's plans. Even these two facts are quite enough to understand why the KGB carefully guards its secrets.Quite personally
Many personal funds related to the lives of famous people are also closed to the general public. Much that should not be known is hidden in Stalin’s personal archive. But at least the names of these materials are known. Here there are, in particular, outgoing cipher telegrams from Stalin for the period of the 1930s, correspondence of the Secretary General with the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR and the Ministry of the Armed Forces of the USSR for the 1920–1950s, letters from citizens and foreigners addressed to Stalin, documents about Molotov's trip to London and Washington in 1942. Besides this, we will probably never know the details of the personal lives of Marina Vladi and Vladimir Vysotsky. Former Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov will not reveal state secrets to us, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn will not tell us about his innermost thoughts. Personal archives of public persons are most often closed from public access by their heirs. For example, the personal fund of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, stored in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, is in closed access, because the heir - the writer's wife Natalya Dmitrievna - decides for herself whether to make the documents public or not. She motivated her decision by the fact that documents often contain poems by Solzhenitsyn that are not particularly good, and she would not want others to know about this.Difficulties of declassification
In 1991, the archive of the President of the Russian Federation was formed, which combined documents from the former archive of USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, and later the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin. During the first 10 years of the foundation’s existence, many materials were declassified, but in the early 2000s this process was suspended, and documents that had already been made public were classified again. The head of Rosarkhiv, Andrei Artizov, noted in one of his interviews: “We declassify documents in accordance with our national interests. There is a declassification plan. To make a decision on declassification, we need three or four experts with knowledge of foreign languages, historical context, and legislation on state secrets.” What are the country's leaders afraid of when declassifying documents, many of which have already crossed the half-century mark? Researchers cite a number of reasons: Among them, for example, is the very difficult issue of cooperation between the USSR and Nazi Germany on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, reflected in numerous documents. Among other reasons are mentioned: the real scale of repressions of the Stalinist government against its people; destabilization of the world situation by the USSR; facts that destroy the myth about the USSR’s economic assistance to other states; wasting public funds to bribe third world governments to gain support from the UN. In fact, all prohibited materials can be summarized into two main categories: documents that present the Soviet regime in an extremely negative light, and documents that in any way relate to the ancestors of modern politicians, which we would like to keep silent about. This is quite understandable, since both of them can seriously undermine the reputation of modern Russia - the legal successor of the USSR - in the eyes of the whole world."It's hard to write about secret documents precisely because of their secrecy, writes rambler.ru. - No one except those initiated in state secret, does not know what they contain. IN best case scenario, we can only roughly list the cases to which classified materials may relate.
Many documents related to the activities remain inaccessible to researchers higher authorities state power USSR 1930-1980s, especially during the Second World War. The NKVD archives related to the Great Terror 1930s, so the truth about this tragic time can be revealed, at best, to the children of living researchers. What is it about the Soviet past that can discredit the present? Russian state, if it turns out to be brought into the light?
The authors of the material note that these are only their assumptions, since it is unknown whether such events really took place, and if so, on what scale, and whether documents testifying to them have been preserved. But assumptions are not taken out of thin air, but are based on indirect data given in publications that appear from time to time.
These could be, for example, documents about the mechanisms of organizing and carrying out the mass “Red Terror” during the Civil War, the origin of the Bolsheviks’ funds during the revolution and their true ties with the enemy Germany in those years, about secret negotiations of the Soviet leadership with both Germany and and with the Entente, with the financial circles of the West, about all the circumstances of the conclusion Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and the role of specific individuals in its imprisonment, the collaboration of the Bolsheviks with Islamists in the East, the use of prisoners of war and military advisers from Germany and Austria-Hungary in the creation of the Red Army, the role of the institution of hostages in forcing “bourgeois specialists” to work for Soviet power, about the total genocide of the “bourgeoisie” in Petrograd in 1918, about the suppression popular uprisings in 1918-1921 and all the circumstances of the famine in the Volga region in 1921-1922, about the genocide of the Cossacks.
"The fate of some is also unclear national minorities- for example, historians do not know for certain where after civil war Almost half a million Chinese who were in Russia disappeared, the material notes. - Until now, only from local archives and indirect publications can one judge the scale of popular resistance to collectivization and the measures to suppress it, in which units of the regular Red Army were involved, including combat aviation And chemical forces. The scale of military cooperation between the Red Army and the German Reichswehr in 1922-1935 has only been partially revealed."
Also, the scale of sales abroad by the Soviet government is still unknown. cultural values from private collections, churches and museums confiscated during the revolution. All documents on the Holodomor in the early 1930s have not yet been declassified, not only in Ukraine, but also in southern Russia, Kazakhstan and other regions.
"Regarding the period of World War II, declassification of plans could cause obvious damage to the state offensive war against Germany, regarding the division of the world into spheres of influence, regarding neighboring states, - noted in the material. - Historians also suspect a taboo on the publication of genuine data on the losses of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War. Obviously, if in fact there was an order from Stalin to evict all disabled people of the Great Patriotic War from major cities, then the documents testifying to this will never be made public in our state. The stamp of secrecy will obviously remain indelibly on everyone Soviet plans war with the USA after 1945, on many documents relating to foreign policy of this period."
As for the post-war times closer to us, documents on the scale of free assistance USSR to Third World countries and the composition of such assistance, about the war in Afghanistan and about medical and biological experiments on living people that may have been carried out in the USSR. Although it is precisely the classification of such documents that gives rise to monstrous rumors about the secrets that are hidden in them. And these rumors often cause even greater damage to the prestige of the state than the possible opening of archives.
"I remember how stubbornly Gorbachev denied the existence of secret applications to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and documents about the Katyn execution,” writes tverdyi-znak in his Live Journal. - But they were in the archives, and Gorbachev was well aware of their existence. And he was silent."
