65th anniversary of Great Victory: RGANTD electronic project ‘Hardened by the Great Patriotic War’

On May 6, 2010 the Russian State Archive of Scientific & Technical Documents in Moscow (RGANTD) launched its electronic project ‘Hardened by the Great Patriotic War’.

The presentation was organized by the RF Culture Ministry, Federal Archive Agency, RGANTD, and its branch with the support of the Russian Federation State Archive, the Russian State Economy Archive, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, the Russian State Archive of cinema and photo documents, the Russian State Military Archive, the Russian State Archive of Navy, the Russian State Archive of Phonodocuments, the Moscow Central Archive of Scientific & Technical documentation, S. I. Vavilov Institute of science and technique history under the Russian Academy of Science.

The project is a sort of historical and documentary exhibition characterized by the combination of text and graphic documents with other historical monuments of the age – photographs, rare editions, etc. At the same time it can be regarded as a subject digital catalogue of Federal Archives documents.

The project has some benefits of the virtual exposition: unlimited access regardless time and place; possibility to expose full-text documents and documents of large format; providing documents with detailed annotations, comments, references, etc.

For the first time the archivist have made an attempt to show the scientific and technical documents of the pre-war and war period in complex and basing on their historical significance. The exhibited archive documents demonstrate the processes of creation and application of different types of arms, Red Army and Navy armament objects during the pre-war period and the Great Patriotic War. Presented are the reports of scientific researches, designs, drawings, applications including drafts and schemes, photographic albums, diagrams, schemes, graphs.

The project includes over 900 models of documents most of which are demonstrated to public for the first time. Among them are eminent embodied projects (such as T-34 tank, Il-2 attack plane, ‘Katyusha’) which were widely used on the battlefronts of the Great Patriotic War along with little known and not embodied (for example, self-propelled mounting SU-76I, fighter La-7, rocket depth charge of Artemyev-Fonarev; antitank rifle of M. L. Mil’).