Translated material
Funeral in code
Declassified archives of the Ministry of Defense will make it possible to clarify the number of victims of the Great Patriotic War
The Russian Ministry of Defense has removed the classification of secrecy from a huge array of documents from the Great Patriotic War. This was announced yesterday by the head of the archive service of the military department, Colonel Sergei Ilyenkov.The corresponding order No. 181 was signed by Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov on May 8. It is called “On the declassification of archival documents of the Red Army and Navy during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.” This order removes the secrecy stamps from archival documents that are stored in the Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defense in Podolsk near Moscow, the Central Archive of the Navy in Gatchina, Leningrad Region, and in the Archive of Military Medical Documents of the Military Medical Museum in St. Petersburg. These are documents from the directorates of the General Staff (and therefore the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command), the People's Commissariat of the Navy, branches and branches of the military, logistics, special forces, weapons and military equipment directorates, front headquarters, military districts, fleets - up to and including a separate military unit.
There is no special reason for such a large-scale action. In Russia, until 1993, there was no special law regulating the periods of secrecy. So whether or not to remove the stamp from archives that date back so long is still decided by the holding agency. And only for documents published after 1993, when the Law “On State Secrets” appeared, this period is set at 30 years. But it can also be extended.
According to Colonel Ilyenkov, the war should have been declassified long ago. More than 4 million archival files have become available in the Podolsk archive alone. This would not have happened if they had used the old, so-called commission method, when there was a central expert commission, the same commissions in the troops, main and central departments. Each page of the case was “screened” for the presence of state and military secrets, and only then a report was drawn up. The work efficiency was negligible. For example, each file is on average 250 pages, multiplied by 4 million, stored in Podolsk, and in both maritime archives there are hundreds of thousands of documents - the work would last several decades. By order of May 8, everything was declassified at once, bypassing the labor-intensive commission check.
Now researchers and users of archival information have access to unique documents. According to the Law “On Information,” access to military archives can be open to everyone, as long as we are talking about unclassified documents. Still unclassified, and this is only 1%, only documents from military tribunals and military courts remained, and only because their fund holder is the Main Military Prosecutor's Office and the Main Directorate for the Activities of Military Courts. Encrypted telegrams are also closed - often not even because of the content, but because of the method of transmission, that is, the cipher and code. After agreeing on the details with the Federal Agency for Government Communications, the military is ready to release most of the encryption codes. But it is absolutely certain that the documents from the special archive of the Main Intelligence Directorate will remain intact - it is not listed in the minister’s order.
The head of the archival service assures that the declassified documents will not yield any sensations or stunning discoveries. The Vremya Novostey correspondent asked whether among the declassified documents there were any that confirmed or refuted the version of Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun) that Stalin was preparing to be the first to begin hostilities against the Third Reich , but Hitler was ahead of him. Colonel Ilyenkov, a professional military archivist who has worked in this field for almost twenty years and has access to almost all archival military documents, replied: he has never found confirmation, even indirect, of Mr. Suvorov’s version. It is possible, however, that they lie in one of the archives that previously belonged to the party.
Sensations are sensational, but it is quite possible that open documents from the war era will make it possible to clarify the number of military personnel killed: today we know about 8 million 600 thousand. Based on the results of a study of the papers of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense, an electronic data bank on fallen soldiers is being created. The work is scheduled to be completed by March next year.