Many people are now interested in the fate of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who are considered missing during the Great Patriotic War. So they write to me in a personal message and leave requests in the group to find their relatives. It is unlikely, of course, that a miracle will happen and I will show you a specific place where to look for an ancestor; my goal will rather be recommendations for finding information about the missing person and an algorithm for establishing their fate.

An example of determining the fate of a missing person

How, for example, to determine the fate Ionin Konstantin Alekseevich, if the number of his teaching staff, unit, division is not indicated?

Only his place of conscription for the war is known - this is the village of Podgorodnyaya Pokrovka, Chkalovsky rural district, Chkalovsk region. That is, most likely the person was drafted by the Chkalov OVK. This means you need to make a request to the regional military registration and enlistment office (in this case Orenburg) with a request to send you the information contained in the draft card.

The most valuable information will be information about the number of the draft team and the date of departure of the team from the recruiting station. Further on each team number and date is usually attached name list, which indicated number of the military unit and its address.

For the most part, conscripts from military registration and enlistment offices were not sent to the front immediately; at first they were either marching companies or reserve rifle regiments and brigades. These reserve formations were sent first to any front transit point, where specific divisions were already formed, and then they were only sent to the front line.

If the answer comes from the military registration and enlistment office that the map was not found, lost, there is no information, then it is necessary to thoroughly study the material on the topic, which divisions and units were formed at the time of the ancestor’s conscription in this particular region or neighboring ones. This will help you in writing to indicate the number of the division, regiment in which the ancestor served at the time of disappearance.

In our case, in the city of direct conscription Chkalov, they were created at different times, unfortunately, the time of deployment is unknown, only the military registration and enlistment office, two reserve rifle divisions (ZSD) can help with this:

• 95th reserve rifle regiment (ZSP) 13th WHSD,
• 65 ZSP 45th WHSD,
• 92 ZSP 13 WHSD,
• 365 ZSP 13 WHSD.

By establishing through the military registration and enlistment office which reserve regiment of which division was stationed in Chkalov in 1941, you can find out where it was subsequently sent.

Information for those seeking in Orenburg

In the fall of 1941, the 11th cavalry and 360th rifle divisions were formed in Chkalov immediately before they were sent to the front.

You can trace the combat path of these divisions until the moment of the disappearance of a relative using the “Journal of Combat Actions” in TsAMO down to hours and minutes and find out the exact place in which the person received the status of missing in action.

When a person was absent from a unit for 15 days, he was assigned this status.

Briefly about the combat path of the 360th Infantry Division: formed in Chkalov in the fall of 1941. In December 1941, she was sent to the Moscow defense zone, as part of the 4th Shock Army of the North-Western Front, she took part in the Toropetsko-Kholm operation, then until the late autumn of 1942 she occupied a deep defense. At the end of 1942, she fought on the Kalinin Front (now Tver Region) and took part in the Velikoluksk offensive operation. I will not continue further, since according to information from relatives, Ionin Konstantin Alekseevich went missing in 1942.

Research in the Podolsk archive of the Ministry of Defense

There is another clue to finding out the division in which a relative fought - this is working independently in the archive in Podolsk. There in TsAMO there is 9th department, in which are collected reports of a door-to-door post-war survey. In these documents, the PPS (field postal station) can miraculously be recorded, which will greatly facilitate future searches, because knowing the PPS number, we will establish which division it was part of.

In the end, we write a request to the archive with the obligatory indication of the place of service at the time of the loss.

Establishing the fate of Babkov Tikhon Petrovich

Another reader is interested in the fate of Babkov Tikhon Petrovich, a native of the Savelyev Konstantinovsky farm, formerly Nikolaevsky district, Rostov region. Here it should be noted that there is a slightly different direction of search. With the help of the leader of the Donskoy search team, Vyacheslav Gradoboev, the reader managed to find out Tikhon Petrovich’s last place of service. It is also known that he was awarded the Order of the Red Star, and then everything was silence. Babkov Tikhon Petrovich commanded the 3rd platoon of the rifle company of anti-tank rifles of the 409th separate anti-tank fighter division of the 107th division, which means he was at least a junior lieutenant. This means that he is an officer, but there is card index of officers and irretrievable losses of officers.

The response from the archives of the Ministry of Defense will contain an extract from the service record, which will indicate

• from what year the requested person was in the spacecraft,
• in what year and what title was awarded,
• when a person is called up for mobilization and where he is sent,
• if a person is missing, then it is indicated when he is excluded from the lists of the Armed Forces,
• if a person was awarded, like Babkov Tikhon Petrovich, there should be information about this.

The answer comes from the archive six months to a year later in the form of an archival certificate:

How to make a request to the Moscow Region Central Election Commission, see my article ““. By the way, don’t forget to include in the letter blank envelope with return address.

Another small clue about Tikhon Petrovich: there is information that during the liberation of Stary Oskol he was seriously wounded, and accordingly had to be sent to the hospital. The reader should contact Military Medical Museum of the Ministry of Defense in St. Petersburg to establish the number of the evacuation hospital and the further fate of the person. Most likely, he died in hospital from his wounds.

If the information is not found

And if, nevertheless, it was not possible to trace the fate of the serviceman, you can only hope that some search party will find your relative and inform you.

For example, on the website of the Memorial Sergei Mironovich Protasov, a native of the village of Aleksandrovka, Chkalovsky district, is still listed as missing, and on the search engine website there is information that his remains were found near Stalingrad, here is an extract:

assistant chief of the 6th department of the headquarters of the 126th Infantry Division, Lieutenant Protasov Sergey Mironovich, born in 1918, Russian, native of the Chkalovsk region, Aleksandrovsky district, village of Aleksandrovka, employee, member of the Komsomol since 1938. Secondary general education. In spacecraft since 1939. Cadre officers. He had a wife, Chekushkina Alexandra Petrovna.

The lieutenant's remains were found by searchers between the village of Privolny and the village of Vasilievka in the Volgograd region, where the headquarters of the 126th division was located; only 14 people were found. Protasov was considered missing since August 29, 1942 and was excluded from the lists of the Armed Forces. Now he has been found. If any of your fellow countrymen sees this information, please post it on regional Internet resources.

Bottom line

The summary of the above is as follows: not a single person can independently find a needle in a haystack, and in our case it is impossible to do this without the help of archivists and independent work in the archives. Write to the appropriate authorities, contact us and luck will definitely smile on you. I hope that my site will be useful to you in finding information about the missing person and establishing the fate of the serviceman.

“Washed in blood”? Lies and truth about losses in the Great Patriotic War Zemskov Viktor Nikolaevich

1. Accounting for personnel of the Armed Forces of the USSR before the Great Patriotic War

For many years, the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (hereinafter referred to as TsAMO RF) assured us: “There was no personal record of private and junior command personnel in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, therefore, inquire about service during the Great Patriotic War, for example, for missing persons a Red Army soldier - it doesn’t seem possible.” These words were not immediately believed, although with difficulty. It was difficult to imagine the fact of the state’s lazy connivance in recording the service history of an individual person in the army, while at the same time there is a very strict system of recording the same person in civilian life: registration, registry office, military registration, medical records, social insurance, party, Komsomol, trade unions, local committees, house committees, collective farms, state farms, etc. It’s no joke - the same military personnel counted and took into account during the last spring registration of 1941 every single person in civilian life who, due to age and health status, was subject to conscription and mobilization in the event of war, dividing them into ranks and resource categories, and recording the soldier’s progress they allegedly did not carry out the service.

And we believed in the absence of a soldier’s record of service in the state only because we were told this heresy repeatedly at different levels.

And how can you check whether there was a track record or not? Not a single guiding or commentary document has ever been published anywhere after 1985, and even less so before that. Not a single clue was found in any of the thousands of documents studied by the Central Academy of Medical Sciences of the Russian Federation. Not a single former employee of the 4th department (department) of the district military registration and enlistment office (hereinafter referred to as RVK) or the headquarters of any military unit ever said a word to anyone they knew: “There was accounting, there was, and what else!” Silence everywhere.

But the Internet came. At the Forum of our website www.soldat.ru several years ago, one of the guests shared the news about how an aging former RVC employee told him a long-standing secret about the general seizure in 1949–1950. all registration records and other primary documents for rank and file from pre-war times and during the war. These words became the first tiny swallow. Now the second, heavier one has arrived, which we first published 2 years ago on our website (see photo below). This is a “swallow” that doesn’t need any words of comment. She does not accept denials, is self-sufficient and answers many questions that arise.

Registration and service card of the rank and file of the Red Army

There was an accounting, and a detailed one! And this accounting was the cornerstone of the historical memory of wartime and the fate of millions of people. If we consider that in the ranks of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (hereinafter referred to as the Red Army), taking into account the size of the army by June 22, 1941, about 35 million people served in the period 1941–1945, then the practical purpose of destroying primary documentation becomes clear - and financial ( pay less pensions), and political. If these documents were available, it would be easy, if desired, to calculate the exact numbers of non-returning soldiers for each RVC in the country and to know the price of Victory and the price of the leadership of the CPSU (b) - CPSU. There were 40 years left before the creation of the Book of Memory began, when in 1949, in an atmosphere of pervasive secrecy, no one could even imagine ever publishing exact lists of the dead and missing. After all, even notifications about the fate of soldiers (funerals) were declassified only in 1990 after the adoption of the Resolution of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee of January 17, 1989 “On the All-Union Book of Memory” (I. Ivlev “The Memory You Keep,” Tyumen: TID, 2008, p. 132 ) and in connection with the start of work in 1990 by its district and city editorial boards.

In the military personnel registration system in the USSR, everything was interconnected. Each RVC, when assessing resources for mobilization at one time or another, was based on data from mandatory personal accounting. Even in peacetime, some of the reservists and future conscripts were assigned to certain military units, where they were to be sent when mobilization was announced.

The period before the war was no exception. The pre-war registration of recruits and reservists in the first half of 1941 was carried out twice: as usual, at the beginning of the year - in January-February, and the second time in the period April 15 - May 15, after the new Chief of the General took office on February 1 headquarters G.K. Zhukov and the adoption from February 12 to the development of a new mobilization plan “MP-41” (TsAMO RF, f. 140, op. 13002, d. 5, pp. 5–134). The latest re-accounting of resources and registration were carried out precisely to obtain the most accurate data on the potential number of soldiers for a future war, and not just to assign (bind) reservists to specific military units in a particular military district, including for those formations which just began the formation on February 19–20, 1941 - new 15 rifle corps, 25 rifle divisions, 21 mechanized corps, 41 tank and 21 motorized divisions (TsAMO RF, f. 15-A, op. 1845, d. 12, ll. 101–124). At the same time, information about persons reserved in production and in the party active was clarified, and the number of those unfit for military service, as well as those of limited fitness, was identified. The status of civilians in the reserve was divided into two categories (USSR Law “On General Military Duty” of September 1, 1939, Art. 31):

1. Persons who have served in active military service in the ranks of the Red Army and the Red Navy or have completed it in a non-military manner during the period of annual military training, including those who are on special registration for the NKVD troops.

2. All other persons.

The direction of mobilized reservists to military units during mobilization or training was carefully recorded in the records of the RVC, respectively, after the departure of the team and after the end of the calculations in each RVC they could quickly report to the top: how many more reserve military personnel of all categories and ranks and registered recruits can be mobilized, how many registration of those who are of limited fitness, how many are deregistered as unfit for health, how many are included in the reservation. At every single moment, along the vertical military registration and enlistment offices there were consolidated accurate data on personnel resources in the district, city, region, and republic. Only the war introduced an element of imbalance in accounting after the movement of multi-million masses of new units and formations, as well as evacuated civilians who had reservations, and ordinary private individuals. But this element of chaos in January-March 1942 was quickly overcome.

In the registration card of the military reserve (Fig. 2, 3), at the last pre-war registration, his military registration specialty (MRS) was indicated, the type of military service, team number and often the actual number of the military unit to which the soldier was assigned, if by age and due to his health, he was subject to mobilization. Very often there was a photo of a person stuck in the corner.

The conventional numbers of commands in each military district encrypted military units, both existing and planned, which, due to the call for the mobilization of reservists, were to be deployed to wartime states or formed in the first month of the war. Such newly formed units were, for example, reserve rifle brigades, new artillery regiments, engineering and road units, communications units, local guard units, field hospitals and other medical authorities, a huge list of other rear institutions (warehouses, bases, service companies, workshops, postal authorities etc.).

Each assigned person was given a mobilization order (summons) in advance during registration, which indicated the day of his arrival after the start of mobilization, for example, “on the 2nd day of mobilization,” the time of arrival at the assembly point, the team number or the actual number of the military unit, in which person is assigned. For a mob order to come into effect, it was sufficient to either make a personal call during covert mobilization in accordance with Order of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR No. 0130 of June 20, 1940 (“Russian Archive: The Great Patriotic War: Orders of the People’s Commissar of Defense of the USSR”, volume 13 (2–1), M.: TERRA, 1994, p. 148), or the announcement of the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the SSR on the beginning of open mobilization. In the service record card (hereinafter referred to as the CPC) of the rank and file of the Red Army, which we publish, at the top you can see the line “Name of unit and unit.” This is where the actual, and not conventional, name of the military unit was indicated. On the back of the card, the stages of service in all military units were listed, with the dates, numbers of movement orders and seals of the military unit headquarters.

According to the GShKA Directive No. mob/1/542241ss dated March 1, 1941, reserve personnel, including commanding officers, of the following nationalities were not subject to registration: Germans, Poles, Romanians, Finns, Bulgarians, Turks, Iranians, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese (TsAMO RF, f. 8-A, op. 2729, d. 28, pp. 17–30). In addition, reserve conscripts of local nationalities, after a thorough check, were assigned to combat and rear units in a dispersed manner, without creating national units. Those who did not speak Russian at all, including commanding personnel, were not assigned to units and institutions. This did not mean that they could not be mobilized if war broke out.

We had at our disposal the Code of Criminal Procedure of persons assigned to the troops of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (hereinafter NKVD), and even in two types. We believed that such documents were issued only for those who were designated to serve in the system of this People's Commissariat. The Code of Criminal Procedure for the rank and file of the Red Army, which we published above, unambiguously confirms the existence of an entire system of service records for rank and file personnel in the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR (hereinafter referred to as NKO). Therefore, only an informed person who did not want to reveal the truth could seriously talk about the fact that there was no track record of the soldiers. Or as deceived in his time as we were.

Military reserve registration card

The accounting of the number of conscripts and mobilized at that time of war is now based on data from preserved conscription books. But they are secondary, but they were primary draft cards of recruits, registration cards of those liable for military service in the reserve and the Code of Criminal Procedure of the rank and file of the Red Army. Almost all of them were removed from the RVK according to a special, still secret and not yet identified by researchers post-war General Staff Directive of 1949, with their replacement with a surrogate - a conscription book. The General Staff document prescribing these actions has not yet been discovered, but there are scant indirect references to it in surviving documents, for example, from the Arkhangelsk Regional Military Commissariat. Such a document could be signed by both the Chief of the General Staff and his deputy, but even with such positions they are forced people, they will do whatever they order from above. The top leader for them was the Minister of War, and above him was the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. But he would hardly have done anything in this direction without orders from the CPSU Central Committee; there is no escape from this. So - Khrushchev and his comrades? This question remains open for now...

Assessing this process, we can safely say: the military registration and enlistment offices did this job “some to the forest, some to the firewood”! What a military commissar's heart it was! Some performers tried to transfer as much data as possible into the alphabetical book: full name, year of birth, home address, place of work, date of enlistment, rank, number of military specialty, team number or name of the unit to which the mobilized was sent, date of dispatch, and sometimes even subsequently indicated his fate. Others did the minimum, entering only their full name, year of birth (not always), date of enlistment (not always), address (not always), rank, and educational qualifications. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were listed on registration cards were not included in the conscription books at all! The reasons for this are reflected in the following material.

For many years, hundreds of thousands of people have been searching for their relatives who perished in the war. The chain of knowledge about a fighter, as a rule, breaks off at the draft registration and enlistment office - according to the draft book (if preserved), he was drafted at that time. That's all! Where they were sent, when, as part of which team (each had their own number), with whom - the answer in 95% of cases is negative: “There is no information in our RVC.” Yes, all the free places in the offices were filled with them at one time! There was a “sea” of information in every military registration and enlistment office, but now the vast majority of them have nothing! Where could SO MANY documents go? Why are the draft books, essentially secondary sources, given a shelf life of 75 years, while the primary ones don’t even have ten years?