New documents marking the anniversary of the victory in the Battle of Stalingrad entered the Presidential Library’s collection

On February 2, our country celebrates the Day of Military Glory of Russia. 80 years ago, in 1943, the Soviet army defeated the Nazi troops in the battle of Stalingrad, providing the beginning of a radical change in the course of the Great Patriotic War and World War II. In 2022, the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin signed the Decree “On the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazi troops by the Soviet troops in the Battle of Stalingrad”.

The Presidential Library features rare materials that tell about the details of the great battle. The 1942 section of the major collection Memory of the Great Victory combines documentary and journalistic publications from 1942–1949, a documentary film by the Russian Historical Channel The Next Target is Stalingrad (2013), photographs depicting the destruction of Stalingrad during the war and the appearance of the restored city. There are also such unique electronic photo documents as, for example, a photograph of a banner embroidered by Norwegian women for the defenders of Stalingrad and handed over through the Soviet embassy in Sweden on the day of the first anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad.

Fragments of the newsreel Battle of Stalingrad. Defence of Stalingrad (2010) spotlight the period of 1942–1943. The footage shows how soldiers are running across destroyed Stalingrad, urban battles are going on, tanks are moving, infantry in camouflage coats. A close-up is the commander of the Stalingrad Front, Colonel-General Andrei Eremenko, Georgy Zhukov is at the table with a map, and other prominent Soviet commanders are also shown.

The entire collection and the section dedicated to the Battle of Stalingrad are constantly updated with new materials.

Marking the anniversary of the victory at Stalingrad, the collection Heroic Stalingrad, published in 1943 by the Stalingrad Regional Commission on the History of the Patriotic War, was placed on the library’s portal. It features fictional stories, documentary and journalistic essays of participants and witnesses of the battles, as well as documents - orders and resolutions, for example, on the mobilization of Komsomol members and youth to defend Stalingrad.

Another collection - Siberians in the defence of Stalingrad (1943) - tells about the exploits of the Siberian regiments of the division of Major General Leonty Gurtiev. The writer Vasily Grossman said about this division: “Heroism has become a way of life, heroism has become the style of the division and its people, heroism has become an everyday, everyday habit.”

Letters (1941), a photograph and Yury Klimovich's mobilization certificate into the Red Army, as well as memoirs (2015) of his brother Konstantin Komarovskikh were received from the personal family archive to the library holdings.

Other materials of the war and post-war years dedicated to Stalingrad also entered the collection, for example, a sketch of the medal "For the Defence of Stalingrad" in 1942.

The Presidential Library has been forming the electronic collection Memory of the Great Victory since 2010. It includes official documents, photographs and newsreels, wartime newspapers, books, agitation and propaganda publications, collections of articles, biographies, testimonies of participants in combat battles and home front workers, their personal documents, images of military and labor awards, monuments and memorial complexes.

More than 10 thousand documents on the prehistory and history of World War II and the Great Patriotic War are included in the Collection of digitized archival documents, film and photo materials World War II in Archival Documents, which is available on the Presidential Library’s portal worldwide. The organizers of the Collection are the Federal Archival Agency (Rosarkhiv), the Administrative Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation and the Presidential Library. The Collection is carried out by the Rosarkhiv and federal state archives with the participation of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, the state archives of Belarus and etc.