Rare archival photographs and audio records from the Great Patriotic War entered the Presidential Library's collections

On March 20, 2024, photo and audio documents from the period November 19, 1942 – November 7, 1944 entered the Collection “World War II in Archival Documents” available on the Presidential Library's portal. 

For the first time, the Collection includes more than 60 photographs from the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents (RGAKFD), which testified to the cruel, inhumane crimes of Nazism against Soviet civilians, women, children, the elderly, and against Soviet prisoners of war. After the formation of the Extraordinary State Commission on November 2, 1942 to establish and investigate the atrocities of the Nazi invaders and their accomplices, work began on collecting and recording the crimes of the Nazis.

The photographs show the bodies of women and children shot by the Nazis in Kerch; tortured residents of Krasnodar and Orel; relatives identifying those executed in Sevastopol; recovery of the bodies of Soviet citizens in Petrushinskaya Balka in Taganrog; dead civilians in the courtyard of a prison in Rostov-on-Don.

The photographs of executed residents of Kharkov and Poltava are terrifying; a 62-year-old resident of Melitopol, shot by the Nazis for refusing to go to work in Germany; of an executed family from Berdyansk; photographs of the burial of men, women and children discovered during excavations of an anti-tank ditch along the Sokal - Tartakov road in Lvov Region of the Ukrainian SSR.

The photographs depict historical footage of the liberation of Petrozavodsk residents from a concentration camp by the Red Army, evidence of Nazi crimes in the Baltic states: the bodies of burned Red Army prisoners of war in one of the graves of the IX Fort of the Kaunas Fortress (Lithuania), the dead prisoners of the Klooga concentration camp (Estonia).

These photographs are clear and indisputable evidence of the genocide of the Slavic population.

Partisans made a great contribution to the future Great Victory over Nazism. The photographs depict partisans of Kursk and Orel, Crimea, partisans of the G. I. Kotovsky detachment of the Ukrainian SSR, the S. A. Kovpak 1st Ukrainian partisan division, Belarusian partisan detachments, and a parade of Belarusian partisans on the occasion of the liberation of Minsk. 

Factories producing military equipment and ammunition operated in the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia. Wartime photographs show factory workers producing and packaging shells for the front, accepting tanks from Uralvagonzavod workers in Nizhny Tagil, collective farmers of Ivanovo, Saratov, Leningrad, Tambov Regions exceeding the standards for supplies of meat, milk, and vegetables to the front.

The Collection also contains more than 20 fragments of sound recordings from the collection of the Russian State Archive of Sound Documents (RGAFD) with messages from the Soviet Information Bureau and orders of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, read out by the announcer of the All-Union Radio Committee Yu. B. Levitan: about the defeat of the Nazi troops at Stalingrad and breaking the siege of Leningrad (January 25, 1943), about the liquidation by troops of the Don Front of a group of German troops surrounded to the west of the central part of Stalingrad, and the capture of the commander of the 6th German Army, Field Marshal F. Paulus (January 31, 1943), about the capture of the cities of Orel and Belgorod (5 August 1943), on the liberation of Donbass (September 8, 1943), Odessa (April 10, 1944), Kerch (April 11, 1944), Feodosia (April 13, 1944), Sevastopol (May 10, 1944), Minsk (3 July 1944), Vilnius (July 13, 1944), Chisinau (August 24, 1944), Bucharest (August 31, 1944), Sofia (September 16, 1944), Tallinn (September 22, 1944), Riga (October 13, 1944 year), Belgrade (October 20, 1944). 

These historical moments were captured in photographs by famous front-line photojournalists M. A. Trakhman, E. A. Khaldei, L. O. Bernshtein, G. F. Konovalov, A. A. Arkhipov. The photographs depict the Romanian population greets Don Cossack guards passing through the village, local residents greet Soviet soldiers in Lublin, residents of Sofia greet Soviet soldiers, Soviet sappers with mine detectors check the streets of Belgrade.

Records of the speech of Metropolitan Nikolai (Yarushevich) of Kyiv and Galicia with a call to fight Nazi invaders and congratulations on the liberation of Kharkov (August 25, 1943) have been preserved.

The commander of the troops of the Steppe Front, Colonel General I. S. Konev (August 30, 1943), speaks about the courage and heroism of the soldiers who liberated Kharkov in his speech. At the rally on November 7, 1943, in honor of the liberation of Kyiv, the commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, Army General N. F. Vatutin, and the Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Marshal of the Soviet Union G. K. Zhukov, delivered their speeches. They talked about the successes of the Red Army in 1943, about the battles for Kyiv and the help of partisans in the liberation of the Ukrainian SSR, about the atrocities of the Nazis during the occupation.

In accordance with the List of instructions for the implementation of the Address of the President of the Russian Federation to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation dated January 15, 2020, the organizers of the Collection of Digitized Archival Documents, Film and Photo Materials "World War II in Archival Documents" 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 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 others.

To date, the volume of the Collection is over 12 thousand materials: maps, diagrams, periodicals, photographs, newsreels for the period from January 1933 to December 1944.

Archival documents of the Collection World War II in Archival Documents are available from anywhere in the world thanks to the Presidential Library’s portal. Especially for the foreign audience, the titles and annotations to the documents as well as the texts of the accompanying articles are also available in English.

In addition to digitized archival documents the Collection contains a list of the main Internet projects, databases, other thematic online documents, virtual tours of the history of World War II, developed by government agencies of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation and various organizations.