In the last decade, the number of legal disputes related to the protection of the rights of military personnel has increased significantly, which can be explained, firstly, by the fact that big amount violations of the rights of the military by the command, and secondly, unskilled work of personnel service employees. Military personnel, despite their greater dependence on their own leadership than civilian employees, are increasingly challenging judicial procedure actions of personnel authorities due to incorrectly drawn up documents, which leads to a violation of the rights and legitimate interests of military personnel.
A serviceman's personal file is the main personal accounting document that is maintained for citizens conscripted for military service. conscript service, and for military personnel performing military service under a contract.
In accordance with Federal Law of March 28, 1998 N 53-FZ "On military duty and military service" information about military personnel is entered into their personal files and military registration documents, the maintenance and storage of which is carried out in the manner established by legislative and other regulatory legal acts Russian Federation <1>.
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<1>
the federal law establishes the following list of information that must contain the personal files of military personnel:
- last name, first name and patronymic;
- Date of Birth;
- place of residence and place of stay;
- Family status;
- education;
- place of work;
- fitness for military service due to health reasons;
- professional suitability for training in military specialties and for military service in military positions;
- basic anthropometric data;
- military service or alternative civilian service;
- passing military training;
- knowledge of foreign languages;
- availability of military and civilian specialties;
- presence of the sports category of a candidate for master of sports, the first sports category or sports title;
- initiation or termination of a criminal case against a citizen;
- presence of a criminal record;
- reservation of a citizen who is in reserve for an organ state power, organ local government or organization for the period of mobilization and in wartime<2>.
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<2>Federal Law of March 28, 1998 N 53-FZ “On Military Duty and Military Service” (as amended on December 8, 2011 N 424-FZ) // SZ RF. 2011. N 50. Art. 7366.
The procedure for creating and maintaining a conscript’s personal file is defined in the Instructions for the preparation and conduct of events related to the conscription of citizens of the Russian Federation who are not in the reserves for military service (2007)<3>.
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<3>Order of the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation dated October 2, 2007 N 400 “On measures to implement the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation dated November 11, 2006 N 663” (as amended on January 19, 2011; June 29, 2012) // Russian newspaper. 2007. N 284.
A personal file is opened for a citizen subject to conscription for military service when he is initially registered for military service. Cases are formed on paper and in in electronic format and are stored as a database of personal records of conscripts.
Personal files are placed in the file cabinet and in the archives of the military commissariat. Access to personal files or database is strictly limited.
Handing over personal files to conscripts or their relatives, sending them to medical institutions and other organizations are not allowed. If necessary and if there is a corresponding request, the organization may be sent duplicates of personal files or extracts from them certified by the military commissar. Storing personal files outside a file cabinet or archive is not permitted. For work during the working day, personal files are issued to performers against signature.
Personal files of conscripts are maintained by certain officials in compliance with the requirements of the Federal Law "On Personal Data"<4>.
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<4>Federal Law of July 27, 2006 N 152-FZ “On Personal Data” // SZ RF. 2006. N 31. Part 1. Art. 3451.
Cases are filled in with ink or ballpoint pen. Records determining the address of residence of the conscript or his relatives are made indicating the postal code. Entries in the personal file are clarified and, if necessary, corrected each time the conscript arrives at the military commissariat. Based on changes in the conscript's registration card, changes are made to the personal registration database.
A file of personal files is formed after checking the correspondence of the availability of personal files of conscripts with the data of the alphabetical books before compiling annual report on the conscription of citizens for military service.
In each section of the card index, in accordance with its structure, an inventory of the personal files of conscripts is compiled, in which their number is entered in pencil. In column 9 of the alphabetical record book, a record is made in pencil about the location of the personal file in one or another section of the file cabinet, and the expected date for summoning the citizen to the draft board is also indicated. In this column, after transferring a citizen to the reserve or removing him from military registration, various reasons recording is made in ink or ballpoint pen.
Personal files of each category of persons in the corresponding section of the file cabinet are distributed by year of birth, and in them - alphabetically and are stored in equipped cabinets that ensure the safety of documents.
The composition of documents and the management of personal files of military personnel performing military service under a contract are established by several regulatory legal acts.
In accordance with the Regulations on the procedure for performing military service, the first copy of the contract for military service, after it comes into force, is attached to the personal file of the serviceman who entered into the contract, and the second is given to the serviceman in his hands<5>.
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<5>Regulations on the procedure for military service, approved. Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of September 16, 1999 N 1237 “Issues of military service” (as amended by Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of July 12, 2012 N 980) // SZ RF. 2012. N 29. Art. 4075.
The procedure for maintaining personal files of contract military personnel is carried out in accordance with the requirements of the Accounting Manual personnel Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, approved by Order of the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation dated December 19, 2005 N 085<6>. In accordance with it, in addition to the contract, the following documents are placed in the personal file:
- order of the relevant military official on appointment to a position;
- achievement list;
- autobiography;
- photos;
- certification and additional materials;
- card for access to information constituting state secrets;
- documents characterizing the serviceman (questionnaire, copies of education documents);
- documents on retraining, advanced training, military service experience, etc.
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<6>Guide to personnel work in military organizations: Practical publication / Astakhov A.A. Series "Law in the Armed Forces - consultant". M.: "For the rights of military personnel", 2009. Vol. 98. P. 180.
Changes in the list of certification and additional materials of the personal file are determined by the instructions of the Main Personnel Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
Personal files are first compiled in military educational institutions in duplicate, simultaneously with the preparation of submissions for the assignment of the first officer rank to the cadets.
The personal files of warrant officers are compiled in one copy.
If enlistment as warrant officers (midshipmen) comes from among sergeants and soldiers undergoing military service, then a personal file is opened in the military unit. For candidates entering military service under a contract for military positions warrant officers from among those liable for military service - at the military commissariat.
When assigning first positions to warrant officers officer ranks their personal files are not re-compiled and are maintained at their place of service. A second copy of the personal file is compiled for the personnel authority of the appointing authority.
Personal files are maintained by officials of personnel departments of military command and control bodies, military units and organizations, military commissariats, who are entrusted with the work of maintaining accounting documents. They are personally responsible for the accuracy of the information recorded in their personal files.
All personal documents are filed in a cover established sample by sections. The service record, which is the main document of the personal file, and autobiographies are filed at the beginning of the personal file in all copies.
Sheets of documents filed in a personal file are not numbered. In each section of the personal file, internal inventories are kept in which the names of all documents filed or attached to the file, the dates of their preparation and the number of sheets are recorded. Previously compiled inventories of documents cannot be re-compiled and are not certified upon forwarding.
Seizure of individual documents from a personal file is carried out only with the permission of the commander of a military unit or the head of the personnel agency. Regarding seized documents, a record is made in the internal inventory of the relevant section about when the document was seized, where and under what outgoing number it was sent, or where it was filed after seizure. If the seized document is destroyed, the number and date of the destruction certificate are indicated. The record of the seizure of documents is certified by the signature of the chief of staff of the military unit or the head of the personnel agency and the official seal.
Documents filed in a personal file and their copies are not issued to military personnel. Compiled service records are maintained throughout the entire service of military personnel.
To mutually verify the completeness and correctness of registration data, personal files maintained in military units at the place of service are compared with the personal files of personnel authorities. The timing and procedure for reconciling personal files are established by the heads of the relevant personnel authorities as necessary, but at least once every two years.
Upon official request, a personal file may be sent to another military authority, military unit or an organization to review its materials when deciding on the transfer of a serviceman to a new duty station. When a decision is made to transfer a serviceman, his personal file is sent to the appropriate personnel authority.
For military personnel undergoing military service under a contract, transferred from the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation to other federal bodies executive power, which provide military service, and vice versa, personal files are again compiled, which, when completed, are assigned the “Secret” stamp. Old service records that were kept for these military personnel in other federal executive bodies are filed in the section " Additional materials"The first copy of the personal file.
To summarize, we can state the presence special order formation and management of personal files of military personnel of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, which is established by military legislation and regulatory legal acts of the military department.
L.D. Shapovalova
K. and. n.,
Associate Professor at Russian State University for the Humanities
On March 13, 1954, the security officers were removed from the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, and a new department was formed: the State Security Committee of the CCCP - KGB. New structure was in charge of intelligence, operational search activities and state border protection. In addition, the task of the KGB was to provide the CPSU Central Committee with information affecting state security. The concept is broad, to be sure: it includes the personal life of dissidents and the study of unidentified flying objects.
Separating truth from fiction and recognizing disinformation intended for “controlled leakage” is now almost impossible. So, to believe or not to believe in the truth of the declassified secrets and mysteries of the KGB archives is everyone’s personal right.
The current security officers who worked in the structure during its heyday, some with a smile, some with irritation, brush it off: no secret developments were carried out, nothing paranormal was studied. But, like any other closed organization that has influence on people’s destinies, the KGB could not avoid being a hoax. The activities of the committee are overgrown with rumors and legends, and even partial declassification of the archives cannot dispel them. Moreover, the archives of the former KGB were seriously cleaned in the mid-50s. In addition, the wave of declassification that began in 1991-1992 quickly subsided, and now the disclosure data coming and at an almost imperceptible pace.
Hitler: dead or saved?
The controversy has not subsided since May 1945. Did he commit suicide or was the body of a double found in the bunker? What happened to the remains of the Fuhrer?
In February 1962, captured documents from World War II were transferred to the TsGAOR of the USSR (the modern State Archives of the Russian Federation) for storage. And along with them - fragments of a skull and a sofa armrest with traces of blood.
As Vasily Khristoforov, head of the registration and archival collections department of the FSB, told Interfax, the remains were found during an investigation into the circumstances of the disappearance of the former Reich President of Germany in 1946. A forensic examination identified the partially charred remains found as fragments of the parietal bones and occipital bone of an adult. The act dated May 8, 1945 states: the discovered pieces of the skull “may have fallen from the corpse taken from the pit on May 5, 1945.”
“Documentary materials with the results of the repeated investigation were combined into a file with the symbolic name “Myth”. The materials of the named case, as well as the materials of the investigation into the circumstances of the Fuhrer’s death for 1945, stored in Central Archive FSB of Russia, were declassified in the 90s of the last century and became available to the general public,” said the agency’s interlocutor.
What remained of the top of the Nazi elite and did not end up in the KGB archives did not immediately find rest: the bones were repeatedly reburied, and on March 13, 1970, Andropov ordered the removal and destruction of the remains of Hitler, Braun and the Goebbels couple. This is how the plan for the secret event “Archive”, carried out by the task force, came into being. Special Department KGB 3rd army GSVG. Two acts were drawn up. The latter states: “The destruction of the remains was carried out by burning them at the stake in a vacant lot near the city of Schönebeck, 11 kilometers from Magdeburg. The remains were burned out, crushed into ash along with coal, collected and thrown into the Biederitz River.”
It is difficult to say what Andropov was guided by when giving such an order. Most likely, he feared - and not unreasonably - that even after time fascist regime there will be followers, and the burial place of the ideologist of the dictatorship will become a place of pilgrimage.
By the way, in 2002, the Americans announced that they had X-rays that were kept by the dentist, SS Oberführer Hugo Blaschke. Reconciliation with fragments available in the archives of the Russian Federation once again confirmed the authenticity of parts of Hitler’s jaw.
But despite the seemingly indisputable evidence, the version that the Fuhrer managed to leave Germany, occupied by Soviet troops, does not leave anyone alone modern researchers. They usually look for it in Patagonia. Indeed, Argentina after World War II gave shelter to many Nazis who tried to escape justice. There were even witnesses that Hitler, along with other fugitives, appeared here in 1947. It’s hard to believe: even the official radio of Nazi Germany on that memorable day announced the death of the Fuhrer in the unequal struggle against Bolshevism.
Marshal Georgy Zhukov was the first to question the fact of Hitler's suicide. A month after the victory, he said: “The situation is very mysterious. We did not find Hitler’s identified corpse. I cannot say anything affirmative about Hitler’s fate. At the very last minute he could have flown out of Berlin, since the runways allowed this.” It was June 10th. And the body was found on May 5, the autopsy report was dated May 8... Why did the question of the authenticity of the Fuhrer’s body arise only a month later?
Official version Soviet historians is as follows: On April 30, 1945, Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide. At the same time, according to eyewitnesses, the Fuhrer shot himself. By the way, during the autopsy, glass was found in the oral cavity, which speaks in favor of the version with poison.
Unidentified flying objects
Anton Pervushin, in his author’s investigation, cites one illustrative story characterizing the KGB’s attitude to the phenomenon. The writer and assistant to the chairman of the committee, Igor Sinitsyn, who worked for Yuri Andropov from 1973 to 1979, once loved to tell this story.
“Once, while looking through the foreign press, I came across a series of articles about unidentified flying objects - UFOs... I dictated a summary of them to the stenographer in Russian and took them to the chairman along with the magazines.... He quickly leafed through the materials. After thinking a little, he suddenly took it out of the box desk some thin folder. The folder contained a report from one of the officers of the 3rd Directorate, that is, military counterintelligence", Sinitsyn recalled.
The information conveyed to Andropov could easily become the plot of a science fiction film: the officer, while on a night fishing trip with his friends, watched as one of the stars approached the Earth and took the form aircraft. The navigator estimated the size and location of the object by eye: diameter - about 50 meters, height - approximately five hundred meters above sea level.
"He saw two bright rays come out from the center of the UFO. One of the rays stood vertically to the surface of the water and rested on it. The other ray, like a searchlight, searched the expanse of water around the boat. Suddenly it stopped, illuminating the boat. Shining several more on it seconds, the beam went out. Along with it, the second, vertical beam went out,” Sinitsyn quoted the counterintelligence report as saying.
According to his own testimony, these materials later came to Kirilenko and over time seem to have been lost in the archives. This is roughly what skeptics reduce the KGB's probable interest in the UFO problem to: pretending that it is interesting, but in reality burying the materials in the archives as potentially insignificant.
In November 1969, almost 60 years after the fall Tunguska meteorite(which, according to some researchers, was not a fragment celestial body, and the castaways spaceship), there was a message about another fall of an unidentified object on the territory Soviet Union. Not far from the village of Berezovsky in Sverdlovsk region Several luminous balls were seen in the sky, one of which began to lose altitude, fell, and was then followed by a strong explosion. In the late 1990s, a number of media outlets obtained a film that supposedly captured the work of investigators and scientists at the site of an alleged UFO crash in the Urals. The work was supervised by “a man who looked like a KGB officer.”
“Our family lived in Sverdlovsk at that time, and my relatives even worked in the regional party committee. However, even there, almost no one knew the whole truth about the incident. In Berezovsky, where our friends lived, everyone accepted the legend about the exploded granary "Those who saw the UFO chose not to spread the word. The disk was taken out, presumably, in the dark, in order to avoid unnecessary witnesses," contemporaries of the events recalled.
It is noteworthy that even ufologists themselves, people initially inclined to believe in stories about UFOs, criticized these videos: the uniform of Russian soldiers, their manner of holding weapons, cars flashing in the frame - all this did not inspire confidence even among susceptible people. True, the denial of one particular video does not mean that adherents of the belief in UFOs are abandoning their beliefs.
Vladimir Azhazha, a ufologist and acoustic engineer by training, said this: “Does the state hide any information about UFOs from the public, we must assume that yes. On what basis? Based on the list of information that constitutes the state and military secret. Indeed, in 1993, the State Security Committee of the Russian Federation, at the written request of the then president of the UFO Association of Pilot-Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, handed over about 1,300 documents related to UFOs to the UFO center I headed. These were reports from official bodies, commanders military units, messages from individuals."
Occult interests
In the 1920-30s, a prominent figure in the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) Gleb Bokiy, the same one who created laboratories for the development of drugs to influence the consciousness of those arrested, became interested in studying extrasensory perception and even searched for the legendary Shambhala.
After his execution in 1937, folders with the results of the experiments allegedly ended up in the secret archives of the KGB. After Stalin's death, some of the documents were irretrievably lost, the rest ended up in the committee's basements. Under Khrushchev, work continued: America was worried about rumors periodically coming from overseas about the invention of biogenerators, mechanisms that control thinking.
Separately, it is worth mentioning another object of close attention of the Soviet security forces - the famous mentalist Wolf Messing. Despite the fact that he himself, and later his biographers, willingly shared intriguing stories about the outstanding abilities of the hypnotist, the KGB archives did not preserve any documentary evidence of the “miracles” performed by Messing. In particular, neither Soviet nor German documents contain information that Messing fled Germany after he predicted the fall of fascism, and Hitler placed a bounty on his head. It is also impossible to confirm or deny the data that Messing personally met with Stalin and he tested his outstanding abilities, forcing him to perform certain tasks.
On the other hand, information about Ninel Kulagina, who in 1968 attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies with her extraordinary abilities, has been preserved. This woman’s abilities (or lack thereof?) are still controversial: among lovers of the supernatural she is revered as a pioneer, and among the scientific fraternity her achievements cause at least an ironic grin. Meanwhile, video chronicles of those years recorded how Kulagina, without the help of her hand or any devices, rotates the compass needle and moves small objects, such as Matchbox. During the experiments, the woman complained of back pain, and her pulse was 180 beats per minute. Its secret was supposedly that the energy field of the hands, thanks to the superconcentration of the subject, could move objects falling within its zone of influence.
It is also known that after the end of World War II, a car made on Hitler’s personal orders came to the Soviet Union as a trophy: it served for astrological predictions military-political nature. The device was faulty, but Soviet engineers restored it, and it was transferred to the astronomical station near Kislovodsk. Knowledgeable people they said that FSB Major General Georgy Rogozin (in 1992-1996 former first deputy chief of the presidential security service and who received the nickname “Nostradamus in uniform” for his studies on astrology and telekinesis) used captured SS archives concerning occult sciences in his research.
For the “secret” classification to actually appear, the state needs compelling reasons. Most of these cases are state secrets.
But many personal archives of famous people become secret at the request of their heirs, who do not regret making their ancestors appear in an unflattering light.
The most secret documents became in 1938
A radical change in the matter of classifying information occurred in 1918, when the Main Directorate of Archives was organized under the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR. The brochure “Save the Archives” published by Bonch-Bruevich was distributed through “Windows of ROSTA” to all government agencies, where there was, in particular, a provision on the secrecy of certain information.
And in 1938, management of all archival affairs passed to the NKVD of the USSR, which classified a huge amount of information, numbering tens of thousands of files, as secret. Since 1946, this department received the name of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, and since 1995 - the FSB.
Since 2016, all archives have been reassigned directly to the President of Russia.
Questions for the royal family
The so-called famous Novoromanovsky archive has not been fully declassified royal family, most of which was initially classified by the Bolshevik leadership, and after the 90s, part of the archival documents was made widely public. It is noteworthy that the work of the archive itself was strictly confidential. And one could guess about his activities only from indirect documents of employees: certificates, passes, report cards wages, personal files of employees - this is what remains of the work of the secret Soviet archive.
But the correspondence between Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Fedorovna has not been fully disclosed. Palace materials concerning the relationship between the court and ministries and departments during the First World War are also not available.
KGB Archives
Most KGB archives are classified on the grounds that the operational investigative activities of many agents can still cause damage to counterintelligence work and reveal the methodology of its work. Some successful cases in the field of terrorism, espionage, and smuggling have also been mothballed.
This also applies to cases related to intelligence and operational work in the Gulag camps.
Stalin's affairs
1,700 files compiled in the 11th inventory of the Stalin Foundation were transferred from the archive of the President of the Russian Federation to the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, of which about 200 cases were classified as secret.
The cases of Yezhov and Beria are of considerable interest, but they were published only in parts, and complete information there are still no cases of “executed enemies of the people”.
Confirmation that many more documents remain to be declassified is the fact that in 2015, at four meetings of the Interdepartmental Expert Commission on the Declassification of Documents under the Governor of St. Petersburg, 4,420 cases for the years 1919-1991 were completely declassified.
Party archives are also “secret”
Council resolutions are of considerable interest to researchers people's commissars or resolutions of the Council of Ministers, decisions of the Politburo.
But most of the party archives are classified.
New archives and new secrets
The main task of the archive of the President of the Russian Federation, formed in 1991, was to combine documents from the former archive of the President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, and then the subsequent period during the reign of Boris Yeltsin.
The Presidential Archive contains about 15 million various documents, but only a third of them, five million, are in the public domain today.
Secret personal archives of Vladi, Vysotsky, Solzhenitsyn
Personal funds Soviet leader Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vladimir Vysotsky and Marina Vladi are closed to the general public.
Do not think that documents are classified as “secret” only with the help of government officials. For example, the personal fund of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, stored in the Russian state archive literature and art, is in secret storage because the heir, the writer’s wife Natalya Dmitrievna, personally decides whether or not to make the documents public. 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.
In order to make public the materials of the investigative case in which Solzhenitsyn ended up in the Gulag, it was necessary to obtain the consent of two archives - the Ministry of Defense and the Lubyanka.
Plan for "secrets"
The head of Rosarkhiv, Andrei Artizov, said 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."
Special Commission on Declassification
In order to declassify materials in each archive, a special commission. Usually - from three people who decided on what basis to give or not give wide publicity to this or that document.
Secret materials are of unconditional interest to a wide range of people, but historians warn that working with archives is a delicate matter and requires certain knowledge. This is especially true for secret archival materials. Not many have access to them - thousands of documents from time to time Russian Empire and the Soviet Union are classified for various good reasons.
AiF.ru continues publishing interviews with research fellow Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO) by Anton Migai. the expert spoke about how Soviet troops times of the Great Patriotic War a record was kept of the dead and missing, as well as how work is now being carried out to clarify this data.
According to German data, about 5 million Soviet citizens were captured during the war, but data could only be recovered on a small part of the prisoners - about a million people. In the second part of the interview, the expert talked about why not all data on Soviet prisoners of war in German camps has been published or is available to specialists, as well as how the Nazis kept records of prisoners and when all the data from these archives will be declassified.
Vladimir Shushkin, AiF.ru: What happened if our fighter was captured? Did our part record him as dropped out?
Anton Migai: Missing. If someone saw that he raised his hands and ran away into enemy territory, then they write “surrendered.” Well, basically, of course, it was recorded as “missing in action.” Next we turn to the German archives. A serviceman was recorded on the list of prisoners...
Transport of Soviet prisoners of war by the Germans, 1941. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Federal Archives of Germany
— Is this his German unit recording? Does she take someone prisoner and record them on the spot in her unit?
— On the spot, in the unit’s archives. Next they send to transit points, to transit camps. It has its own statistics. They are sent to what is called “Dulag”. This is just transit camp, from the German abbreviation (Dulag = Durchgangslager - transit, or transit camp - editor's note). It has its own statistics of the dead, there is its own statistics of the sick, the living, there is its own statistics of further movements. Again, how are these statistics kept? Do the Germans consider it necessary to keep a family record? Does the serviceman state his real name, surname, patronymic? Or something else? Dies nameless? And if he dies, did they count him or not? There are many factors by which a military member is taken into account. But if the prisoner of war passed the transit camp, he was sent further behind the front line - to Germany or to the territory occupied by Germany, sent to work, a more detailed accounting is already underway there. Photographs are already taken there, fingerprints are already taken there. The so-called “green card” is created, since they are made of green cardboard. Again, a German clerk who did not speak Russian wrote it down by ear, and the man’s surname changed beyond recognition. The place of birth has changed beyond recognition. A photo and a fingerprint are still a rare piece of luck, because they could have decided not to take a photo or there was no such opportunity. They didn't take pictures then. They were too lazy to take fingerprints.
Prisoner of War Card. Notes in Russian were made while working with the archive. Photo:
If such a card was issued to a prisoner of war, it travels with him. He was sent to work at the plant, the card was sent there, and a note was made. Died - a note is made. If a prisoner of war continued to fight in the camp, organized some kind of underground group, sabotage, poured sand into the rotating parts of machine tools, assembled a radio, read out Sovinformburo reports, and the Gestapo exposed him, he ceased to be a prisoner of war. He became, according to the laws of the Third Reich, a criminal. He was sent to an extermination camp as a political prisoner.
But there is a small line here that people may not have felt, but according to the paperwork, he ceased to be listed as a prisoner of war and became a criminal. Apparently, from the point of view of the legislation of the Third Reich, he lost some rights. But what rights did he have? It’s funny to talk about this, of course, but all the same, these moments were also taken into account, and this was also reflected in this very “green card”. If, from the point of view of the laws of Germany at that time, a person was dangerous, a corresponding note was made here. Either the map was crossed out in red, or the abbreviation “Darkness and Fog” (“Nacht und Nebel”) was written. This meant that the person was targeted for destruction.
Soviet prisoners of war in the camp, August 1942. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Federal Archives of Germany
Having received such a card, a person did not live in the camp for long; he was destroyed. For other categories of crimes, they were sent to work teams in the camp. Some survived; again, there were underground groups. The prisoners themselves worked with the cards. If a prisoner was a member of some underground group, then he was given a command, and his personal card could be moved somewhere, put in another box, or his last name changed. Prisoners numbered, a gigantic number of people. Someone moved a card somewhere, the person was lucky, the person survived. But records, again, were kept, and it’s good if the documentation of this concentration camp reached us. At the end of the war, the Nazis destroyed both the camps and, most importantly, the archives of the camps. So that these archives are not used in court for an indictment. They worked with them, they entered the archive. They worked with them in the archive. They tried to understand how the German clerk reflected the surname “Smirnov” or “Semyonov”, as it is written, and compiled it into a single database.
— Did you manage to get hold of many German archives?
- Enough. Everything that got into Soviet zone occupation. Archival documents were first confiscated and sent for processing. Naturally, it wasn’t just us who got it. Naturally, the British and Americans got it.
— Is there access to the data that the Allies had in their occupation zone?
- Now there is access. Archival agencies continue to declassify. Even now they continue to declassify. I can’t tell you specifically whether they have an analogue for these documents in our Memorial OBD database. Hardly. For each specific surname, you need to go to work there.
Soviet prisoners of war in the camp. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org / Federal Archives of Germany
— So all the databases were not transferred to the Soviet Union?
— No, very much was not conveyed. A lot of things are still stored there. Well, of course, not the same as in years cold war, official services no longer work with this so urgently, but it is stored. Something is classified, or rather, not declassified. Something is just lying there. Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union are transmitted from time to time. For some kind of political action. Someone comes and delivers. At this level.
- Why is it classified? Is it just automatic? Fifty years there, conditionally?
— It was classified in the 40s because they worked with it. And the declassification period is not 50, but basically 100 years. Therefore, they have not yet been declassified. You know, let's go a little aside. Mata Hari, a famous spy in the First World War. So, her case is still classified. This is because she was shot in 1917, and the period of secrecy is 100 years. That's just in next year, maybe her personal file will be declassified. Although, it would seem, everything is already known about her. And all data is of purely academic interest. Well, this is approximately the level at which everything in the West is stored.
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 in full get acquainted with 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 is important not only to preserve archives, but also to limit access to them for ordinary citizens due to the confidentiality of 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 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, beyond which, if overcome, completely inconvenient and, probably, even shameful and disgraceful pages can open.” real story countries".
Also modern historians They 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 preserved draft 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 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 real losses USSR in the first months of the war.
KGB Archives
The KGB in the USSR, like the CIA in the USA, - intelligence service, which 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 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.
There is information there detailing the KGB's plans to secretly acquire three American banks in Northern California as part of secret operation, created 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 American intelligence agencies managed to figure out the plans of the KGB.
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 are most often closed from open access 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 President of Russia 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 call whole line 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 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.