Internet and History: Audio records about the Great Patriotic War available in the virtual museum "Moscow - Taking Care of History"

The Moscow's Main Archive prepared a project Unforgettable, timed to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Moscow. The virtual museum Moscow - Taking Care of History provides about 200 memoirs of participants and witnesses of the Great Patriotic War, excerpts from radio reports, performances of famous poets and actors.

Audio records are grouped by war years. So, the audio tracks of 1941 are the phono documents of the first months of the war, including a radio report about the sending of the first volunteers to the front on June 23, memoirs of the participants in the Battle of Moscow, speeches of writers Alexei Tolstoy and Arkady Gaidar, the history of the creation of the song My Moscow, a fragment of Joseph Stalin's speech during the parade on Red Square and much more.

A significant part of the 1942 audio tracks illustrates the Siege of Leningrad. This section features the memoirs of residents and soldiers, performances by the poets Olga Berggolts and Mikhail Dudin, the record of Anna Akhmatova's poem Courage performed by the actor Vasily Kachalov, the speech of the writer Vsevolod Vishnevsky from besieged Leningrad. The array of audio records also highlights the Battle for Sevastopol and the beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad. Besides, it presents the memoirs of Moscow schoolchildren.

Audio records of 1943 are memories of the battles at the Kursk Bulge, the Battle for the Dnieper, the battles in the Caucasus, the Kuban and the Crimea, the work of the rear, the help of the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. This section includes collected stories about the war from Georgy Zhukov, Alexander Vasilevsky, Andrey Getman, Pavel Batov, Mikhail Yenshin. Also, it promotes the memoirs of the pilot Alexei Maresyev, the radio message of the German prisoner of war Fritz Tuli to his comrades with an appeal to end the war, the stories of Soviet soldiers about the terrible wounds and exploits of their comrades.

Despite the horrors of the war, its participants continued to live, being involved in everyday life, and joking. There are many records of this kind among the memoirs of 1944. The soldiers in 1944 recall the end of the Siege of Leningrad, the liberation of the Crimea, southern Ukraine and Belarus, the battles in the Baltic States, East Prussia and Poland, the liberation of Bulgaria, the battles on the Danube.

The records of 1945 are memoirs of the liberation of Warsaw, Krakow, Gdynia and Budapest, the capture of Danzig and Konigsberg, the crossing of the Oder, the parade on the central square of Vienna, the meetings of Soviet and American troops on the Elbe River and near Torgau. Besides, the user may learn about the Berlin operation, the signing ceremony of the German Instrument of Surrender and the holiday of May 9, 1945.