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Vitali Semyonov, historian and genealogist, the editor of the show "Wait For Me" (1999-2002)
There is genealogical research when people publish books and study different sources.
For example, there is a very significant society called the Petersburg Genealogical Society -
it is called PeterGen, they publish books.
This organization helps everybody.
That is, there are, for example, lists of St. Petersburg merchants,
the St. Petersburg cemetery, the ancient burial place, which exists in St. Petersburg.
When I found out how the documents which help us to find the information about our ancestors,
particularly those who were killed in the war, were kept, at some point I began to feel horror.
It made my hair stand on end. Why?
The fact is that during the war, as you know, a lot of people were considered to be missing.
And at some point I started to examine the field of military genealogy,
when people asked me to find their missing ancestors.
I estimated it at about 25-30 thousand for the result.
I have not found a single one of them.
I began to get involved in this.
It turned out that 90% of missing people were men
who were called to the military recruiting office during the war
and after that went to some military base which, for example, was completely destroyed during the war,
including its archive, and could not send the lists of the dead to Moscow.
There are a lot of lists of the dead on this site,
but the base was supposed to exist so that they were sent to Moscow.
If the Germans destroyed it completely, there is actually no archive, no staff office and nobody else;
they were razed to the ground in fact.
Even if a soldier broke away from the entrapment, he was not a staff officer
who knew what to do with all of these documents.
Documents of a military base are usually kept in a metal safe deposit box,
and these documents were kept quite carefully.
Secondly, it was possible that many were killed when on trains and carriages full of people were bombed.
In this case there were no lists either, there was no one to make them.
And there are hundreds of thousands of such missing people.
And then I wondered where these people were last recorded.
This place was the recruiting office where they were called up.
If we compare the lists ...
For example, 10 people were sent from the recruiting office to a military base.
Three men arrived, and the rest are missing.
Hence, it is necessary to search for the information about the seven people,
based on where the three arrived.
And when I realized this, I realized also that it was necessary to study the recruiting office documents.
You would have seen them.
It is a pity that I left these pictures at home.
The books with these lists which have been used for 50 years are in very bad condition.
They are all held together with sticky tape which hides several letters,
and the names became absolutely illegible.
Some of them are moist, some of them are burnt.
When I worked in Ingushetia, in one of the military offices there was a fire
which burned the backs of the dossiers.
You take the dossier in order to work with them and see its back burned.
I was simply amazed why these documents had not been studied yet.
I was naive, because I started to get involved further in this.
Let me tell you a small fact:
the first "Memory Book" in Germany, which was not actually a book of memory but rather a book of searches,
was published in 1958 with photos.
In the USSR, the first decision to create a "Memory Book",
where there would only be lists of those killed according to region, was made in 1988, 30 years later.
As for the research, what is it in Germany?
There is some information like
"I know a person who served as soldier of the Wehrmacht somewhere, and I have no information about him."
It is stored in the archives of the German research service as a task.
While it is not carried out, it is a signal that this person is being looked for.
When some information about him that just says he was killed appears, the search is closed.
Probably he died somewhere near Zhytomyr, and somebody saw it.
The search is closed, and this person is excluded from the list of missing people.
What did this process look like in the Soviet Union?
A wife is looking for her husband, a mother is looking for her son,
and she sends a letter to the recruiting office.
The letter is sent from there to the casualty department to Moscow.
There's nothing about him there; however, the fact of the request being made at a certain time is recorded.
After that, a negative result is sent back.
There is no sign that this person is being looked for.
That is, even if information that they found him appears later, nobody informs about it.
In the 80s and in the 90s scouting forces often found dog tags with decayed notes.
And search teams found the relatives of those killed due to the recruiting offices.
The authorities didn’t organize the research throughout the lifetime of the Soviet regime,
and now they are also not interested in it.
For example, it turned out that many people who were considered missing came back.
Just imagine, the regiment was wiped out, three people broke away from the entrapment,
and they were sent to serve in another unit.
But first they will be recorded as missing.
And some people who are recorded at this site as missing were not even killed,
they lived up to 70, and died in their village.
But they will still be registered as missing.
Why not? Because nowhere is there a problem which should be solved.
The system is not well-constructed.
Accordingly, it turns out that this is still true.
So now there are still 5 million missing at the moment.
I insisted that these documents should be published and appealed to the visitors of a site to help me
– it was the most popular genealogy site,
where you can train to become an amateur genealogist for free, forum.vgd.ru. I recommend it to you.
And the volunteers printed 25 pages of the terrible,
shabby lists of the Krasnoselskii military office of St. Petersburg within two days for me.
The document, which was illegible, turned into something as distinct as a MicrosoftWord file.
You can see it at my site, russianmemory.ru.
I was just blown away.
I said: "Listen, let's try to do this in at least one recruiting office.
Everything will be clear there: the orders of this office, the day of departure, the unit, the destination.
A lot of people who are considered missing will be found.
What do you think?
At first there was a battle for Sochi.
The civilian authorities let us do this, they said, we will provide you with a hotel, and the idea is great;
however, the military officials forbade the idea.
When a man was called to the fronts of World War II,
there was a card which said clearly where he had been sent.
In 1950 there was an order to send these cards to the archive of the Ministry of Defense in Podolsk,
and after that these cards were never seen again.
I am sure they were destroyed.
70% of the people who are considered missing can now be found by means of these cards.
It is still unclear who gave the order to destroy them.
But these lists are the last place where this information, albeit in abbreviated form, was fixed.
This is the last source.
But so far all the military recruiting offices, if you tell them that you want to examine it or to print it,
although it is not secret information, they will tell you:
“Why are you requesting this of us, we sent this information to Podolsk.”
Although it was sent to Podolsk, there is nothing there.
You can come there and ask the officials.
You will be told that they did not receive this information.
That is, it was sent, but it was not received.
The military officials did not give up in Sochi
In St. Petersburg.
Kachkovski, the commissar of St. Petersburg, said "no."
First he said that there are no documents.
I sent him the photos.
He said that these were official documents.
We “attacked” him and sent a letter to Poltavchenko,
the governor of St. Petersburg, and made a report on "News. St. Petersburg. "
Now it is the second phase of the battle.
I was in Ingushetia in March and I knew
that the documents had not been kept in so many military recruiting offices because of warfare.
There were exactly four remaining recruiting offices with the lists of those recruited;
it was an amount of work possible for 1-2 people.
I figured out how to do this work.
I arrived in Ingushetia at the Surzhenski recruiting office and took pictures of all these photos.
After that, I appealed to the visitors of the Chechen sites
and the genealogical sites to publish a book together.
The book is called "They were called up from the Chechen-Ingush ASSR".
The people, the Chechens, the Russians, in general, voluntarily print all these lists, it is elementary.
I have done this by myself.
And we are trying to promote our project at this time by means of newspapers spreading the information
that this project is really good;
it turns out that all Russia, all the FSU is recovering the lists of those in Chechnya
who were called up to the war.
This is symbolic.
Indeed, it was allowed in Chechnya.
That is, they said that we could come and do it.
And then we will publish that book.
The question of allowing this project in Ingushetia arose because Chechnya and Ingushetia were one republic.
In Ingushetia it was also allowed.
In August our small group will go back with cameras at the ready,
and we will do it all.
Then we will bring there about five hard drives, a couple of terabytes.
We will load all these files on some site such as photofile.ru, agreeing in advance with the Chechens.
It is necessary to print it, so that anyone can make a request alphabetically,
or according to a military recruiting office, or according to the calendar and so on.
I think word-of-mouth advertising will work for us.
For example, someone has got free time,
and he prints at least one or two pages in a Microsoft Word file and sends it to me.
We also need two brigadiers to organize the process and to edit the lists.
This is a normal working scheme; all this can be done without any huge public investment.
I now have such a dream.
Specifically, we are going to perform the first stage of it in August.
Why Ingushetia? The reason for this was an order.
A missing person was called up from Ingushetia, from a Cossack village called Troitskoye.
I could not find him.
And I realized that the problem is the same:
he has been called up, but we don’t know where he has gone.
And I realized that this problem must be solved en masse.
It is quite fun when you're a historian,
you have studied something and you are actually doing something meaningful.
Before this, I carried out educational projects in Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachaevo-Cherkessia.
In March I visited Ingushetia, because I was fulfilling an order.
I really liked it there.
In this regard, I wanted to do something for Ingushetia to Chechnya, and I invented this project,
"They were enlisted from the Chechen-Ingush ASSR",
which should recreate the lists of people
who were recruited from the territory of this multi-ethnic republic in 1941
in order to dispel the rumours that Chechens and Ingushetians did not serve in the army.
There were a lot of Ingushetians in the Brest Fortress, and they heroically defended it.
Other nationalities were also recruited from the territory of the two republics.
And I want all the Russian people to take part in compiling these lists.
I think it will be quite significant and interesting.
