Translated material
Frontline 2007
Russia is stepping up efforts to bury soldiers from past wars
Russia continues to bury its soldiers killed six decades ago or more. Search teams find and bury those who died decades ago, and who lay there all these years, not buried. Today the search work has intensified. So the head of the Military Memorial Center of the Russian Armed Forces, Major General Alexander Kirillin, says that “the topic has become a pressing issue in Russia and is of interest abroad.” It is difficult to say what was the main reason for the search activity - awakened patriotism or an excess of money from the state.Historians say that Dmitry Donskoy did not leave the Kulikovo field until all the dead were buried with military honors. Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov owns a phrase that seems to be carved on obelisk granite: “The war cannot be considered over until the last soldier who fell in it is buried.” The USSR, apparently, was in no hurry to end the Great Patriotic War - work to search for the remains of unburied soldiers began only in 1965 - the day of the 20th anniversary of the Victory. Everything went rather sluggishly, mainly on a voluntary basis. The “black diggers” were much more active, opening up a whole market for German regalia and weapons in the country of victorious socialism.
Only in 1991, a small department was created in the Ministry of Defense, which in 1999 became known as the Military Memorial Center (WMC) of the armed forces. It has been headed by General Kirillin for nine years now. Two years later, the law “On perpetuating the memory of fallen defenders of the Fatherland” was prepared. A landmark recent step was Russian Presidential Decree No. 37 of January 2006, which assigned the military department the duties of an authorized federal body in this sensitive area. According to the principle, whoever calls for military service buries the dead. Moreover, there are bodies that deal with both - military commissariats. Our military attaches began to be involved abroad for such work.
Today, the search work, says General Kirillin, covers all regions of the country, all layers of society, affects the work of many executive authorities: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Culture, the FSB, the Foreign Intelligence Service. 11 intergovernmental agreements have been prepared and concluded that regulate Russia’s relations with the states on whose territory there are our military graves and vice versa. Since 1991, certification of military graves has been carried out on the territory of Russia and 49 other states. According to data for that year, there were more than 46 thousand military cemeteries and memorials, of which about 20 thousand were abroad. Today, about 30 thousand military graves have been certified. The official document here is considered to be a registration card or passport of the burial place, certified by the seals of the military commissar or military attache, as evidence that the monument or cemetery has been registered with the state. Second copies of the documents are stored in the War Memorial Center. This data has been converted into electronic form. Despite the widespread reduction in the army, the staff of the VIC has been increased by 25 people.
Since October last year, the center began to create a single data bank on all dead and missing military personnel. “Uncovered” burial sites are being certified, and new interstate agreements are being concluded. The last two are with Romania and China. Agreements are being prepared with all the Baltic states. A structure has been created that search engines have been talking about for a long time - the 90th special separate search battalion, which is stationed in the Leningrad Military District (Mga village) and is engaged in searching for and burying the remains of dead soldiers and unmarked burial sites. Last year, the 90th Battalion recovered the remains of 908 people, all of whom were identified. In the near future, this unit will work on the Nevsky Piglet, where more than 200 thousand people died in a tiny space during three years of war. Today for this battalion the front line is here. The battalion is assisted by public search parties. The Minister of Defense decided to support them - with tents, field kitchens, entrenching tools, uniforms and even financially.
Now the search engines will even have something to reward - a few days ago, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, at the suggestion of the chief of logistics, Vladimir Isakov, decided to introduce a medal and three badges of various denominations. Indeed, there is an Alexandrov medal for cultural workers, a medal of Army General Khrulev for rear service personnel, medals of admirals Kuznetsov and Gorshkov for sailors, Margelov for paratroopers, and so on. Now this list will be supplemented with a medal for search activities.
After the presidential decree was issued, they began to create a national pantheon - a military memorial cemetery in Mytishchi. Detailed detailed design is already being completed, there is a model, land has been allocated, and almost 3 billion rubles have been allocated from the federal budget. Representative offices of the Ministry of Defense are slowly being created in the countries where there are the largest number of our burial sites. At first, these representative offices were called centers for the preservation of Russian graves. In states where this work is well carried out by local authorities, this name has caused confusion. In the Czech Republic, for example. And they left the name - the representative office. These are working structures primarily for carrying out complete certification of burials. So far, the VIC uses data compiled by Soviet groups of forces and military districts (Kyiv, Transcarpathian, Baltic) on the territory of these states. But the data needs clarification. In particular, in Western Germany such certification was not carried out at all, and there are more than 3 thousand burial sites there. The picture is approximately the same in the Baltic states. According to 1991 data, 411 thousand military personnel lie there in 318 graves. Today, additional data has emerged that significantly corrects these figures.
The missions that will be created abroad will also find out what condition these graves are in today, whether they require restoration and restoration, what are the fates of the soldiers buried in these graves; up to now, up to 85% of Soviet soldiers lying abroad are listed as unknown. This is partly a consequence of mass reburials after the war - remains were transported from battlefields to fraternal cemeteries. The graves in these cemeteries were crowned with wooden pyramids with tin stars and surnames on them. Soon they became unusable, erasing memory. And there were cases of vandalism.
The historical and memorial group has been working in Poland for 14 years. Conducted certification throughout the country - 648 burial places, together with the Polish Council for the Memory of Struggle and Martyrdom, published a catalog of burial places. More than a hundred military cemeteries have been restored, where over 450 thousand soldiers and officers are buried out of 600 thousand who died during the liberation of Poland. More than 100 thousand names of the dead have been identified. The center has neither the strength nor the means to search for the relatives of these soldiers. That is why an electronic data bank has been created on the Internet in the public domain.
Representative offices of the Russian Ministry of Defense for military memorial work will continue to be created. A draft presidential decree has been prepared on the creation of seven such units in 14 countries - some of them will work for several states. After all, in addition to Europe, there are Russian military graves in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and China.
Military graves of soldiers of other armies on Russian territory are also within the competence of the Military Memorial Center. In recent years, the remains of more than 10 thousand soldiers who died in Russia have been transported to Italy - Italian laws require the return of their dead soldiers. But there are no plans to transfer mass graves of Soviet soldiers from abroad to Russia, testifies Alexander Kirillin. Individual cases, of course, may occur. For example, the leadership of the Sverdlovsk region turned to colleagues from the Lvov region of Ukraine with a proposal to move the remains of the famous intelligence officer Nikolai Kuznetsov, whose grave was repeatedly violated and desecrated. The remains of Army General Chernyakhovsky have already been transferred.
Recently, Soviet soldiers in some states are increasingly called occupiers. Therefore, why take care of cemeteries where occupiers lie. General Kirillin proposed a universal formula: if the country was occupied by the Nazis, then Soviet soldiers liberated it; if the fascist regime was the system of this state, then the Soviet soldiers are the occupiers. We must choose (as with the current presence of American troops in the territories of some Eastern European states). There were problems of this kind even with Ukraine. Although recently, their state commission for perpetuating the memory of fallen defenders of the Fatherland and victims of political repression received a proposal to create a joint commission to prepare an agreement on the procedure for caring for military graves. But the Ukrainian side, as it became known, will try to equate the SS men of the Galicia division and Bandera with the participants of the Great Patriotic War and give them equal honors. Russia cannot agree to this.
Russia will not agree to passportization of Vlasov cemeteries, Alexander Kirillin is convinced, although he is aware of the tragedy of the fate of the majority of these people. Another thing is the soldiers and officers of the White movement - the Volunteer and Northern armies, the formations that fought in the Baltic states. Memorial signs will be installed at such burial sites. Whites will not be considered traitors and traitors to their homeland. Proof of this is the transfer to Russia of the remains of generals Kappel and Denikin. Perhaps the same will be done with the remains of General Wrangel in the near future.
It’s one thing that I haven’t finished at the War Memorial Center, but something else is on the way. An instruction was received to prepare a draft presidential decree on the creation of an interdepartmental commission on prisoners of war, missing persons and internees. This commission will be headed by Lieutenant General Vladimir Shamanov. Within the commission, a Russian-American group will be legally established, which will work in four areas: the Great Patriotic War, the Cold War, the wars in Vietnam and North Korea. The search for missing persons on the territory of Chechnya is also underway - this case has been entrusted to the Southern Federal District and the administrations of the North Caucasus republics.
The world history of burials has no end.