Nikolai Vladimirovich Stefanovich: poetry. Starodubtsev, Nikolai Filippovich Check information on parameters

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Memory of the people

Later, a more modern website was opened https://pamyat-naroda.ru/ “Memory of the People” with documents of the Second World War, which has a more pleasant design and, most importantly, more information, maps and historical data.

With the help of the “Memory of the People” portal, it has become even easier to reconstruct the military path of your grandfather, find documents about injuries and awards.

The People's Memory project was implemented in accordance with the decision of the Russian Victory Organizing Committee of July 2013, supported by the instructions of the President and the Decree of the Russian Government in 2014. The project provides for the publication on the Internet of archival documents and documents about the losses and awards of soldiers and officers of the First World War, the development of the projects previously implemented by the Russian Ministry of Defense about the Second World War OBD Memorial and Feat of the People into one project - Memory of the People.

On the page https://pamyat-naroda.ru/ops/ you can familiarize yourself with the plans of 226 operations with detailed diagrams on the map. Each page about the operation contains the names of commanders and numbers of military units, as well as a description of the result of the operation.

On the page https://pamyat-naroda.ru/memorial/ you can find military graves in your city. Just enter the name of the city and click the “Find” button. In total, it contains information about 30,588 burials around the world, except the United States.

Figure 2 - Military graves indicating first and last names.

The page about the burial contains information about its condition (good, bad, excellent), type of burial, number of graves, number of known and unknown buried. Also available on the page is a list of those buried with names and dates of birth and death.

On this page we have collected resources that will help you find a soldier (deceased relative or friend), search for those killed and missing in the Great Patriotic War.

Volunteer project "Archive Battalion"

The volunteer project “Archive Battalion” to restore information about participants in the wars of the 20th century accepts and processes applications to study the combat path of participants in the Great Patriotic War.

People's project “Establishing the fate of missing defenders of the Fatherland”

At present, the fate of more than 4.7 million defenders of the Fatherland who went missing during the Great Patriotic War has not been established. To this day, the remains of a large number of Russian soldiers and officers remain unburied.

Memory of the people

The People's Memory project was implemented in accordance with the decision of the Russian Victory Organizing Committee of July 2013, supported by the instructions of the President and the Decree of the Russian Government in 2014. The project provides for the publication on the Internet of archival documents and documents about the losses and awards of soldiers and officers of the First World War, the development of the projects previously implemented by the Russian Ministry of Defense about the Second World War OBD Memorial and Feat of the People into one project - Memory of the People.

Feat of the people

The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation presents a unique open access information resource, filled with all documents available in military archives about the progress and results of major combat operations, exploits and awards of all soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. As of August 8, 2012, the data bank contains information on 12,670,837 awards.

Generalized database "Memorial"

The generalized data bank contains information about the defenders of the Fatherland who died and disappeared during the Great Patriotic War and the post-war period. The work was done on a large scale: tens of thousands of documents were collected and converted into electronic form, with a total volume of more than 10 million sheets. The personal information contained in them amounted to more than 20 million records.

Immortal Regiment of Russia

The all-Russian public civil-patriotic movement “Immortal Regiment of Russia” collects stories about participants in the Great Patriotic War. The database is updated daily. Here you can not only add your veteran soldier to the all-Russian “piggy bank”, but also search through existing ones.

Electronic book of memory “Immortal Regiment - Moscow”

“Immortal Regiment - Moscow” together with the “My Documents” State Service Centers are collecting information about residents of the capital who took part in the Great Patriotic War. Now there are already more than 193 thousand names in the archive.

“Soldat.ru” - database of those killed in the Second World War

Soldat.ru is the oldest portal on the Russian Internet for establishing the fate of dead and missing military personnel and searching for their loved ones.

"The Winners" - Soldiers of the Great War

With our project we want to thank by name the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War living next to us and talk about their feat. The “Winners” project was created for the 60th anniversary of the Victory. Then we managed to collect lists of more than a million veterans living near us.

The site also contains a stunning interactive and animated map of the fighting of the Great Patriotic War.

Electronic memorial “Remember About”

On the social website “PomniPro”, each registered user can create a memory page, a photo gallery of a deceased loved one, talk about his biography, honor the memory of the deceased, leave words of memory and gratitude. You can also find a deceased relative and friend, search for those killed and missing in the Great Patriotic War.

Memorial of the Great Patriotic War

The site is conceived as a people's encyclopedia, a virtual Memorial to the fallen participants of the Great War, where everyone can leave their comments on any entry, supplement information about the War Participant with photographs and memories, and turn to other project participants for help. There are about 60,000 project participants. More than 400,000 cards have been registered.

MIPOD "Immortal Regiment"

The site has a large database of participants in the Great Patriotic War. The chronicle is maintained by community members. Now there are more than 400 thousand names in the archive.

Find a soldier. Memo for those who are looking for their heroes

1. Check the data on the OBD Memorial website

When checking data about a person, open the “advanced search” tab and make attempts by typing only the last name, then the last name and first name, then the full data. Also try to check the information by setting the last name parameters, and the first and patronymic parameters only with initials.

2. Send a request to the archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation

The request must be sent to the address: 142100 Moscow region, Podolsk, Kirova St., 74. "Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation."

Enclose the letter in the envelope, clearly stating the information you have and stating the purpose of the request. Enclose one blank envelope with your home address as the recipient's address.

3. Check the data on the “Feat of the People” website

If you do not have information on awards, you can go to the “Feat of the People” website. In the “People and Awards” tab, enter the information requested.

4. Check parameter information

There are additional ways that can also help you find and identify information about your veteran. The website “Soldat.ru” presents a list of search technologies, we draw your attention to some of them:

• Database of Internet links to school museums of the Russian Federation, which have exhibitions about the combat routes of units and formations of the Soviet Army
• How to establish the fate of a serviceman who died or went missing during the Great Patriotic War
• Information on materials held by the International Red Cross Tracing Service
• Request forms for search, evacuation and search of graves through the Tracing and Information Center of the Russian Red Cross (

Nikolai Vladimirovich Stefanovich was born on January 6, 1912 in the family of an employee, Vladimir Mitrofanovich Stefanovich (d. 1916). Mother, Olga Petrovna (d. 1947), was a teacher. The family also had three daughters. After graduating from school, the poet studied at the Higher Literary Courses in Moscow; before they were closed and dispersed, he managed to complete 3 courses. He studied on the course together with the future director of the House-Museum F.I. Tyutchev in Muranova K.V. Pigarev. Already in his youth, Tyutchev’s work had a great influence on him; Stefanovich devoted research to him; out of love for him, he met the famous poet and literary critic G.I. Chulkov. After the courses were closed, Nikolai Vladimirovich entered the Shchukin Theater School, and after graduating, he worked at the Vakhtangov Theater for eight pre-war years.

I cannot help but mention a sad episode in the life of Stefanovich, which was widely disseminated by literary critic Vitaly Shentalinsky, who published the book “Denunciation of Socrates” in 2001. In the chapter dedicated to the fate of M.A. Voloshin, the author, among other things, devotes several pages to the court case of the Christian poetess Natalia Anufrieva and mathematician Daniil Zhukovsky, who were arrested in Moscow in the summer of 1936. He also writes that the arrest of the latter occurred on the denunciation of Nikolai Stefanovich. Without whitewashing Stefanovich, I still want to say that not everything is completely clear about the details of this case. Most likely, this was not a denunciation, but a confession extracted from the poet during the investigation. The poet was close friends with Anufrieva and Zhukovsky for several years; it was a circle of young truth-seekers and Christian-minded intellectuals. And they most likely met through Chulkov, since Zhukovsky was married to the latter’s sister Anna. I think someone else wrote the denunciation. Another person appeared in the case, a classmate of Daniil Zhukovsky at the Faculty of Mathematics of Moscow State University, who was released from any responsibility and no longer appeared in the case. Stefanovich was apparently blackmailed by his family into appearing as a witness at the trial of Zhukovsky and Anufrieva in April 1937. From the pressure he suffered, he became seriously ill, and subsequently experienced deep mental anguish from the fact that he was unable to show the proper measure of fortitude. Here I can only remember the gospel truth as old as time - “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” It is not at all the business of poets to defend their convictions, proving in the office of NKVD investigators that they are right. Their job is to write good poetry.

In 1941, a bomb hit the theater where Stefanovich was on duty. The poet was seriously wounded and became disabled for life, receiving the 1st group of disability.

That same year, he and the theater evacuated to Perm. After returning to Moscow, he continued to work in the theater for some time. Soon I met B.N. Slutsky, who really liked Stefanovich’s poems and translations. Slutsky recommended him for admission to the section of translators at the State Publishing House, and until the end of his days Nikolai Vladimirovich was professionally engaged in translations: primarily of Eastern poets, in particular Rabindranath Tagore, as well as translations from East Slavic languages. Stefanovich himself knew the languages ​​of the peoples of Yugoslavia quite well, since his father was a Serb. His translations were actively published, many of them were published in the pages of the journal "Foreign Literature".

The poet died on April 14, 1979, and was buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery in Moscow. Stefanovich's original work was practically not published during his lifetime. Through the mediation of Slutsky, 3 small publications were published in the anthology “Poetry Day”. This was, of course, connected with their religious content. Only in the perestroika years did publications appear on the pages of Ogonyok, Rural Youth, Novy Mir, Smena and other publications. The author of this preface was directly related to some of these publications.

Nikolai Vladimirovich STEFANOVICH: poetry

Poet: | | .

IN MEMORY OF THE FATHER

I was left with you as an inheritance,

Did you expect to repeat it forever?

The world was shining, spread apart and raised,
Giving room to your imaginations,

***
How unmistakably and accurately
When they bomb for a week straight,
Pressed against the drainpipe,
Suddenly you know God!
The houses are crooked in horror,
Chills and fainting itching,
And my fingers are slippery...
- Russia!
Do you hear the angels singing?

***
What you lost teases you
And you are sad, dumbfounded,
When they sing on this holiday
Still the same festive tune.
Then you grew up, now you grow up
Now you're exhausted, and yet
Every time you enter the choir,
You are moving towards the past.
Your interrupted childhood
Stop at the Royal Gates -
After all, there is no other way in the world,
To bring him back.

***
O Russia, like Job in the Bible,
You've been stripped to the bones,
And the bottomless abyss of destruction
Yours shines in every puddle.

Both people and angels have changed,
They desecrate and hit me in the face...
This is how, if you believe the Gospel,
The prodigal son returned to his father.

***
O separation of Alpha and Omega!
Vainly and uncontrollably again
All night in the steppe a forgotten cart
Shafts will extend to the stars.

And the bewitched stars listen,
What do the frogs call them in a sing-song voice?
And at that hour they will fall to the ground,
I could not endure the separation of the evil.

Will all times merge then?
Behold the sound of a trumpet, sounding in the midst,
Connects worlds, spaces, distances
And what was, with what is ahead.

Yes, Lord, come! We're so tired
We are waiting for you. - Yes, Lord, come!

***
Sunset field. How gentle and quiet it is here!
Grasshoppers tick dreamily in the grass.
And if we multiply the grass for eternity,
They will be designated by the name of God;
The earth retreated and only remained
And I pray to God, a simple man:
“Oh, if only it would remain like this forever!”
But this moment goes somewhere,
And the whole sky is filled with the pain of separation.

***
Everyone who suffered, got sick,
Having lost everything to the end, -
Knows that this destruction
The Father was not in the house.

All those who have squandered everything,
Gloomily engulfed in darkness,
Childish quality will help out -
Longing to return home.

***
Not everyone can stand it for a moment,
And I had a chance to check it out:
It is full of melancholy, burning thirst
And eternity, solemn to the point of tears, -
Of that eternity that one day
Christ compared it to a mustard seed.

***
From these walls. from gossip and insults
Somewhere to hide, even in a dream.
After all, I feel sick all day long
Swollen, cold palate.

The shabby garden is overgrown with unconsciousness.
Chills and itching. By the wet barn
The rough noise of shabby birches,
Leaky yard and crooked street.

And this is the land that Christ
I wanted to save you by raising you from the dead.

***
I am gripped by an unbearable horror,
Shapeless and black, like a hole,
Only because your baptismal cross
I accidentally lost it today.

After all, there is no God and the devils are made up,
And angels are not visible above,
And the cross disappeared. And therefore, with death
I was left completely alone.

***
It seemed like I was ruining my soul,
And the load is terrible, and there is no way,
But the cross sparkled over the old church,
Almost invisible in the darkness.
And above the church fence
Big clouds are flying
And suddenly inspiring and delighting,
And a heavy burden is light...

MORNING

Now there are not a single board in the fences
You still can’t call it a board
And you won’t stop crossing your hand -
So the morning streets are easy
And the Orthodox sky is like that.

Know God, who is clear through and through,
Bye to portfolios, theses and books,
Things haven't been closed yet
His face revealed too much.

***
Now I'm weak and old
But just like in childhood - at the balcony
A pensive mosquito hangs
On the thread of its own ringing.

And also everything down to the smallest detail,
To every crack on the saucer...
When I hear: "Boy! Hey!" -
I can't help but look back.

***
The board will swing - we'll fly
Towards the sky, roofs, pine trees...
The bicycle was three-wheeled,
And the garden is huge and dense.

I came, having warped my soul,
To the last edge, to the border,
But I’m entering childhood early,
How to enter the festive church.

***
Lord! The beginning of it all!
Was there such a moment
If only I wouldn't bother you
Am I endlessly sad with my longing?

Only once was there an evening full of energy,
So transparent and good
And I thanked you
Laughing and clapping...

To relieve heavy guilt
My sins, deceptions, nonsense -
I'll start right here
When will I be the last to appear in court?

***
The foliage will rustle and recoil,
The trees will close closer...
Where does this temperament come from?
At the stars, mignonette, poplars?

Mysterious herbs and leaves.
Everything froze, the rustling died down,
And I feel that the Eucharist is here,
And I hear: Yours from Yours...

***
June night insinuating bliss,
A chant heard once in childhood.
In the foggy steppe a cart prays,
Raised the shafts to the starry sky.

And about the One Who seemed to be absent -
I realized here, in the mown meadow,
That He moves the planet like this for everyone,
I can’t even move an eyebrow.

Everything is magical: bushes, straw, stone
And the blood pounding in my temple,
And "Our Father" sung by crickets
In a language that people don't understand.

Frosty, windy and bare,
In all worlds, in every region
Holy memory, O Nikola,
Today they celebrate yours.

And in this hour of praise and glory,
By the light of a melting candle,
How to become not dark, not crafty,
Teach how not to die.

PRODIGAL SON

And he told them the following parable...
Luke 15:3

1
In the blue and dense garden
How I want to live endlessly,
When through the shaggy branches
The father's smile will break through.

And now the air is healing,
And the comfort of the paths is bright,
And your constant prayer service
Grasshoppers sing in the grass.

And the boy is a resinous thicket
Taking a running breath, he takes a deep breath,
And the light coming from the father,
It burns in the soul, like in a lamp.
And, squeezing my heart with my palms,
He is ready to cry with happiness...

After all, this is both now and forever,
After all, this is forever and ever.

2
Father is unrestrained and generous
And days and nights long
All yourself to the water and wind,
Gives to flowers and herbs.

And these butterflies and bees,
And these branches are the substance -
Only the embodiment of cheerful thoughts
And his various inventions.

But immediately containing everything,
He himself does not know the orbits,
And only his shadow is big
Sometimes it glides through the greenery.

3
Children's clothes are tight and not suitable for their size,
And the boy rushes about, awkward and gloomy.
He thinks confusedly
and it doesn’t just feel
Everything is out of place and at random.
He loved swings
but meager and fearless
Flying on a leash
which is useless...
Now at a snail's pace
All this seems to him.

4
Told my father:
-I was sent to myself.
I still love your bright home,
I'll leave anyway.
To become an adult from now on,
I will separate from you today.
Maybe I'm awkward and naive
But I'll find my own
limit…-
And he left. And a terrible surge came
shower,
And I didn’t want to calm down until the morning.

5
In space cut and flat
Everything changed and flowed.
He stood in front of the kiosk,
I touched the cloudy glass.
Then chaos broke out again -
Shaggy, tangled, thick...
And this was all accompanied
Some strange nausea.

6
Perhaps he is in battle, in a duel?
And suddenly I remembered clearly again,
Like a wheel on a sunny path
He tried to overtake his own shadow.

No, don't look, don't see, don't touch,
Cover everything with a curtain of rain...
It's stupid to bite yourself by the elbow
Or bang your head against the wall.

7
The yard is languishing, down to dirty logs
The night sky is down.
How the sweet smell is sinful,
Like a stifling wicked wind...
And the bedroom windows appear
And someone's feminine balcony,
Where even the air is catarrhal,
Where even the darkness is inflamed.
In the soul - like in an abyss, like in a well,
But he runs, swallowing the darkness,
And every house laughs at him
And they applaud him.

8
The alarm bell rings in my soul without a break...
Who invented that the will is not strong?
Here's a boy crossing the street
Here's an old man and an old man's cough.

How mysterious and subtle everything is now:
Another invisible push -
And the truck will run over the child,
And, like a candle, the old man will go out.

His fire, swift and stifling,
Eternal destruction lies within itself,
Sliding like a knife near the vital aorta
Any destiny, any existence.

And if he doesn't overcome temptation,
And if the soul is overcome by sin,
It will be devilishly dangerous -
For the old man, for the boy, for everyone.

9
Will the gray old man die,
Or someone else will die, -
Arithmetic is important for nature:
She is neither cold nor hot.

And when from a fragrant dress
Golden grace will breathe in, -
Someone will pay with their lives for this,
Someone suddenly stops breathing.

10
He is crazy and neurasthenic...
Again dawn, losing shame,
Empty streets will be stripped,
The kinks of the stairs will be exposed.

And through the early morning collodion
Now it seems to him that
That someone won't take him away again
Your glassy eyes.

11
Now go and don’t look back...
How all the houses and windows are symmetrical!
Just think: people are sleeping,
- Everything is as usual.

And then the damp dawn took him by surprise,
And it’s scary to look into the entrances and gates...
Perhaps it's true at this moment
Did someone die suddenly?

12
Loneliness. Splashes and slush.
The rain stopped and started pouring again.
As if the sky was trying not to cry,
But she couldn’t restrain herself.

Like someone's big grievances
Became wind, fog, rain...
Or is it the forgotten father
Does he remember his son?

13
The trumpet sings as if in a funeral march.
And again dawn...
During this night he became much older,
For hundreds of years.

Let the soul, in abscesses and growths,
Almost dead...
Everything is so easy, so infinitely simple.
Everything is tryn-grass.

14
The plants became dry
And hardened like metal
When the father's holy name
He desecrated and trampled.

The stars have faded. Everything in the world
Suddenly, mortal fear seized me,
And it was heard in the houses
Frightened children scream.

15
Medicines don't save people
A terrible disease is raging,
And the black kingdom of hunger,
Like the sea, it rages around.

There are corpses lying everywhere.
He is both ashamed and scared...
Knock on someone's window,
Just so you don't have to be alone?

16
Sometimes the look is almost random,
It means almost nothing.
Isn't that right, master?
Did you look at it for the first time?

Above the dark brick outbuilding
The sky was streaked blue...
He looked at him a second time,
And they were very symmetrical
His transparent eyes.

17
And he said: -You are a brave fellow,
You don't care about duty and shame.
Herd my pigs, perhaps...
After all, your father acted naughtily
He will never forgive you.

And he grazes in the damp lowlands
The pigs of their lord, -
He became completely see-through and blue,
And the triumphant pigs
They look at him with mockery.

18
How the blade cuts
In the temples and in the chest,
And tears and gnashing
More to come.

And somewhere in abundance
Cooking for him
Brutal torture
And eternal darkness.

Nobody's angry
Stronger than father...
Torment and screams
There will be no end.

But thunder and executions
He is not afraid:
They are safer
A different silence.

And great horror
Ready to take cover -
And in moans and screams,
And the gnashing of teeth.

Into the impenetrable darkness,
And where else?
Death, and that's okay.
That's all. And the Sabbath.

19
Looking for shorter roads,
Walks with a bitten lip
And he repeats: - how, father,
Will I appear in front of you?

He is ready for severe retribution,
But suddenly, through the morning space,
Father chaotic embrace
I stretched it out towards him.

20
No reproaches, no anger, no rage.
The clouds embrace him
And the father through the hot thickets
He pours out his glee.

The shell is simple and rough
Doesn't interfere with anything anymore
And the trees rustle like banners,
Rushing towards him.

And it sparkles hotter and more solemnly
The blue of the wide open eternity...
This is life's second coming,
This is a holiday holiday. Amen.

*
Almost bordering on fantasy,
Contrary to plausibility, -
This parable has lived for centuries,
An ancient creation of Luke.

Or perhaps this is not heresy,
That light, invisible just like that,
We comprehend only through
Blames, unconsciousness and darkness?

Let the universe freeze
And turn into end-to-end steam, -
To save everything, about the prodigal son
One chapter is enough.

About a Person: Evgeny Yevtushenko about Nikolai Stefanovich

Nikolai Vladimirovich STEFANOVICH (1912-1979)- poet: | | .

From Evgeny Yevtushenko’s anthology “Ten Centuries of Russian Poetry”

Once, in the early sixties, I found Boris Slutsky with a lean, reserved man about the age of my father. The stranger looked at me with searching curiosity, but did not even try to be friendly. It was felt that he had no time for it. There was a clear shadow of some kind of internal pain on his face. He was already leaving and introduced himself, pronouncing his last name Stefanovich with an emphasis on the “e,” which was somewhat unusual.

Is he one of the rehabilitated? - I asked Slutsky.

No,” Boris answered, “he never sat.” But back in 1937, as a witness, he testified at a trial against two of his friends and still cannot forgive himself. But people are too cruel: they don’t want to remember how these testimonies were extracted. Not necessarily torture. After all, everyone’s family is hostage. And his mother was alive and his sisters...

What does he do?

Actually, he is an actor, graduated from the Shchukin School, and before the war he served at the Vakhtangov Theater. In 1941, during a raid, he was on duty on the roof of the theater and was wounded. Became a disabled person of the first group. True, they kept him in the theater, but they gave him only minor roles. He earns extra money, like Desik Samoilov and I, by doing translations at Goslit. On his father’s side he is Serbian and knows the language, he does without interlinear translations. He also writes his own poetry, but he has never published it before. When I read it, I was amazed. Such poets do not lie on the road. In any case, he is the author of one brilliant quatrain. Even if he had not written anything else, it would have been enough to remain in poetry forever.

And Boris Abramovich read four lines, which I have often repeated since then. I hope that both my children and their children’s children will repeat them. Here is this great quatrain, sounding more and more modern and poignant, when the fate of the entire globe depends on what happens even in the tiniest countries:

A single lot binds everyone:
All you have to do is twist your leg -
And at the same moment in Addis Ababa
Someone will scream in pain.

In the book “Denunciation of Socrates” (2001), Vitaly Shentalinsky, whom I deeply respect for his research into Stalin’s atrocities, provides indisputable evidence of Stefanovich’s collaboration with the NKVD, citing his detailed denunciation of the poets Natalya Anufrieva and Daniil Zhukovsky. But I cannot believe that a man who wrote so many kind and strong poems was an informer of his own free will. Surely he became a victim of a merciless meat grinder, a cunning inquisitorial blackmail. I don’t justify him, but I don’t want to throw another stone at him: in my opinion, he punished himself most severely with pangs of conscience. Perhaps, in his thoughts about everything that happened, he wrote his poetic confession dedicated to “Memory of the Father”:

I was left with you as an inheritance,
A cut strand of your hair.
What about our toy childhood?
Did you expect to repeat it forever?

The world was shining, spread apart and raised,
Giving room to your imaginations,
And because I'm disgusting today,
Not only for me, but for both of us.
And because there is no limit to shame,
And because it happened that way, -
Suddenly the medallion turned gray
A brown strand of your hair.

As a deeply religious person, Nikolai Stefanovich lived with a feeling of the impending Apocalypse. And the war unleashed by the Nazis was for him a harbinger of the Last Judgment:

Isn’t that why it’s so creepy?
Isn’t that why the tanks went berserk?
What time has come when the archangel
The graves will be able to open.

Will we understand in the fire and smoke
Of today's war -
What other battles
Are we surrounded at this moment?

He became a tragic participant not only in this Second World War, but also in that eternal endless war of good and evil, whose battlefield is every human soul.

In Stefanovich's poems one can see a man who is entangled in the nets of lies and fear - a man forced to betray his friends, but essentially kind and gentle, not born a traitor, but broken by the shameless rapists of his own people. And was he alone in the sin imposed on him! But at least he repented, and not everyone had the conscience to do so...

Look how much sensitivity, gratitude and sorrow there is in the soul of this sufferer crippled by both wars:

The stars will get tangled in the bushes again,
Shaking leaves and dew from the branches.
Oh, whatever You, Lord, create now -
I won't make any amendments to anything.

You have illuminated the surroundings in a new way,
Everything is permeated through and through by you...
And only the dead can rise again
And that night it failed again.

And what crystal laconicism in the longing for the ideal:

The time will come to fall asleep for the last time,
Pitch darkness will close over me,

And they will turn into a through cloud
Houses, and days, and branches under the window, -
And I’m scared of what’s most earthly
I will lose my longing for the unearthly...

Leaving this life purified by repentance, Nikolai Stefanovich could hope for our understanding and sympathy, for that same mercy, which, as we know, is higher than justice.

It so happened that one day the demon also beguiled Slutsky. Inertial fear from the Stalin era, and even reinforced by his party affiliation, pushed him to the only shameful act in his life: at a general meeting of Moscow writers, he joined the rabid vilification of Boris Pasternak. But, like Stefanovich, Slutsky subsequently openly admitted his tragic guilt:

Angelic, not automotive
I was hit by a wing.

He subjected himself to seclusion and sentenced himself to not writing poetry. Not everyone does this.

Both poets did not try to justify their guilt. They recognized her and redeemed her with self-punishment. Let's forgive them.

LET'S FORGIVE

When my mother came from the Lubyanka archives,
She was silent and did not get into quarrels with the past.
She buried her face in the pillow for a week.
And so she lay there. The eyes did not look at people.

And then she said:
“Don't go there.
All the signatures there are not for black hair and lard.
I'm sorry grandpa.
It’s not even fear - it’s pain that signed it.”

Let's forgive those who survived interrogation nights,
when they pulled out their nails with pliers.
Let's forgive

having repented not in an ostentatious way, but in the most Christian style.

Let's forgive
everyone who has not forgiven themselves,
thinking about one's own conscience, not prestige.
Let's forgive

Let souls not become like scorched deserts.

Let's forgive
everyone who has not forgiven themselves.
Let's forgive them with simple, simple words,
but not so that, having betrayed again, they ask for forgiveness,
and without hinting that they will forgive us in the future too
for the fact that we raised new traitors with softness towards cowards.
This will be the kind of Russia I want...
Evgeniy EVTUSHENKO

We have been keeping the memory of the Great War of the 20th century and its heroes for more than 70 years. We pass it on to our children and grandchildren, trying not to lose a single fact or surname. Almost every family was affected by this event; many fathers, brothers, husbands never returned. Today we can find information about them thanks to the painstaking work of military archives staff and volunteers who devote their free time to searching for soldiers’ graves. How to do this, how to find a WWII participant by last name, information about his awards, military ranks, place of death? We could not ignore such an important topic, we hope that we can help those who are looking and want to find.

Losses in the Great Patriotic War

It is still unknown exactly how many people left us during this great human tragedy. After all, the counting did not begin immediately; only in 1980, with the advent of glasnost in the USSR, historians, politicians, and archive staff were able to begin official work. Until this time, scattered data that were beneficial at that time were received.

• After celebrating Victory Day in 1945, J.V. Stalin said that we had buried 7 million Soviet citizens. He spoke, in his opinion, about everyone, both about those who died during the battle and about those who were taken prisoner by the German occupiers. But he missed a lot, did not say about the rear employees who stood at the machine from morning until night, falling dead from exhaustion. I forgot about the sentenced saboteurs, traitors to the motherland, ordinary residents and siege survivors of Leningrad who died in small villages; missing persons. Unfortunately, they can be listed for a long time.
• Later L.I. Brezhnev provided different information, he reported 20 million dead.

Today, thanks to the decoding of secret documents and search work, the numbers are becoming real. Thus, you can see the following picture:

• Combat losses received directly at the front during battles amount to about 8,860,400 people.
• Non-combat losses (from illnesses, wounds, accidents) - 6,885,100 people.

However, these figures do not yet correspond to complete reality. War, and even this kind of war, is not only the destruction of the enemy at the cost of one’s own life. These are broken families - unborn children. This is a huge loss of the male population, thanks to which it will not soon be possible to restore the balance necessary for good demography.

These are diseases, hunger in the post-war years and death from it. This is rebuilding the country again, again in many ways, at the cost of people’s lives. All of them also need to be taken into account when doing calculations. All of them are victims of terrible human vanity, whose name is war.

How to find a participant in the Great Patriotic War 1941 - 1945 by last name?

There is no better memory for the stars of victory than the desire of the future generation to know. The desire to save information for others, to avoid such repetition. How to find a WWII participant by last name, where to find possible information about grandfathers and great-grandfathers, fathers who took part in battles, knowing their last name? Especially for this purpose, there are now electronic repositories that everyone can access.

1. obd-memorial.ru - here contains official data containing reports of units about losses, funerals, trophy cards, as well as information about rank, status (died, was killed or disappeared, where), scanned documents.
2. moypolk.ru is a unique resource containing information about home front workers. The very ones without whom we would not have heard the important word “Victory”. Thanks to this site, many have already been able to find or help find lost people.

The work of these resources is not only to search for great people, but also to collect information about them. If you have any, please report it to the administrators of these sites. In this way, we will do a great common cause - we will preserve memory and history.

Archive of the Ministry of Defense: search by last name of WWII participants

Another one is the main, central, largest project - https://archive.mil.ru/. The documents preserved there are mostly isolated and remained intact due to the fact that they were taken to the Orenburg region.

Over the years of work, CA staff have created an excellent reference apparatus showing the contents of archival accumulations and funds. Now its goal is to provide people with access to possible documents through electronic computing technology. Thus, a website has been launched where you can try to find a military man who participated in the Second World War, knowing his last name. How to do it?

• On the left side of the screen, find the “memory of the people” tab.
• Indicate his full name.
• The program will give you the available information: date of birth, awards, scanned documents. Everything that is in the files for a given person.
• You can set a filter on the right, selecting only the sources you want. But it's better to choose everything.
• On this site it is possible to look at military operations on a map and the path of the unit in which the hero served.

This is a unique project in its essence. There is no longer such a volume of data collected and digitized from all existing and available sources: card indexes, electronic memory books, medical battalion documents and command directories. In truth, as long as such programs and the people who provide them exist, the memory of the people will be eternal.

If you didn’t find the right person there, don’t despair, there are other sources, maybe they’re not as large-scale, but that doesn’t make them any less informative. Who knows in which folder the information you need might be lying around.

Participants of the Second World War: search by last name, archive and awards

Where else can you look? There are more narrowly focused repositories, for example:

1. dokst.ru. As we said, those who were captured also became victims of this terrible war. Their fate may be displayed on foreign websites like this one. Here in the database there is everything about Russian prisoners of war and the burials of Soviet citizens. You only need to know the last name, you can look at the lists of captured people. The Documentation Research Center is located in the city of Dresden, and it was he who organized this site to help people from all over the world. You can not only search the site, but also send a request through it.
2. Rosarkhiv archives.ru is an agency that is an executive authority that keeps records of all government documents. Here you can make a request either online or by telephone. A sample electronic appeal is available on the website in the “appeals” section, left column on the page. Some services here are provided for a fee; a list of them can be found in the “archive activities” section. With this in mind, be sure to ask whether you will need to pay for your request.
3. rgavmf.ru - a naval reference book about the destinies and great deeds of our sailors. In the “orders and applications” section there is an email address for processing documents left for storage after 1941. By contacting the archive staff, you can get any information and find out the cost of such a service; most likely it is free.

WWII awards: search by last name

To search for awards and feats, an open portal has been organized, dedicated specifically to this www.podvignaroda.ru. Information is published here about 6 million cases of awards, as well as 500,000 unawarded medals and orders that never reached the recipient. Knowing the name of your hero, you can find a lot of new things about his fate. The posted scanned documents of orders and award sheets, data from registration files, will complement your existing knowledge.

Who else can I contact for information about awards?

• On the website of the Central Election Commission of the Ministry of Defense, in the section “Awards are looking for their heroes,” a list of awarded soldiers who did not receive them was published. Additional names can be obtained by phone.
• rkka.ru/ihandbook.htm - encyclopedia of the Red Army. It published some lists of the assignment of senior officer ranks and special ranks. The information may not be as extensive, but existing sources should not be neglected.
• https://www.warheroes.ru/ is a project created with the aim of popularizing the exploits of the defenders of the Fatherland.

A lot of useful information, which sometimes is not found anywhere, can be found on the forums of the above sites. Here people share valuable experiences and tell their own stories that can help you too. There are many enthusiasts who are ready to help everyone in one way or another. They create their own archives, conduct their own research, and can also be found only on forums. Don't shy away from this type of search.

WWII veterans: search by last name

1. oldgazette.ru is an interesting project created by ideological people. A person who wants to find information enters data, it can be anything: full name, name of awards and date of receipt, line from a document, description of an event. This combination of words will be calculated by search engines, but not just on websites, but in old newspapers. Based on the results, you will see everything that was found. Maybe this is where you will be lucky, you will find at least a thread.
2. It happens that we search among the dead and find among the living. After all, many returned home, but due to the circumstances of that difficult time, they changed their place of residence. To find them, use the website pobediteli.ru. This is where people searching send letters asking for help in finding their fellow soldiers, random encounters during the war. The project's capabilities allow you to select a person by name and region, even if he lives abroad. If you see it on these lists or similar, you need to contact the administration and discuss this issue. Kind, attentive staff will definitely help and do everything they can. The project does not interact with government organizations and cannot provide personal information: telephone number, address. But it is quite possible to publish your search request. More than 1,000 people have already been able to find each other this way.
3. 1941-1945.at Veterans do not abandon their own. Here on the forum you can communicate, make inquiries among the veterans themselves, perhaps they have met and have information about the person you need.

The search for the living is no less relevant than the search for dead heroes. Who else will tell us the truth about those events, about what they experienced and suffered. About how they greeted victory, the very first, the most expensive, sad and happy at the same time.

Additional sources

Regional archives were created throughout the country. Not so large, often standing on the shoulders of ordinary people, they have preserved unique single records. Their addresses are on the website of the movement to perpetuate the memory of the victims. And:

• https://www.1942.ru/ - “Seeker”.
• https://iremember.ru/ - memories, letters, archives.
• https://www.biograph-soldat.ru/ - international biographical center.

V.V. Bibikov

Remember by name.
Electronic database “Alphabetical lists of losses of lower ranks 1914-1918.”
Project of the Union for the Revival of Genealogical Traditions (SVRT)

The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War will be celebrated in the middle of this year.

The First World War is one of the most widespread armed conflicts in human history. Before that, it was called the “Great War”, “Second Patriotic War”. And I remember well the words of my grandmother, who called her “German”. In Soviet historiography, the war was considered “unjust and aggressive” and before the outbreak of World War II it was called nothing less than “imperialist.”

As a result of the war, four empires ceased to exist: Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and German.

The participating countries lost more than 10 million people in soldiers killed, about 12 million civilians killed and about 55 million people were wounded.

It is known that during that war, about 15.5 million soldiers were mobilized in the Russian Empire. Of these, about 1.7 million were killed, about 3.8 million were wounded, and almost 3.5 million were captured.

Often, when studying the history of our huge country, we perfectly remember the dates and events that took place in it over many centuries, without thinking at all that all these events were directly related to the fate of our ancestors. The history of a country and society is made up of the stories and destinies of many individual people. Studying the history of one’s family, knowing one’s roots, one’s pedigree helps one to realize the importance of each individual person, allows one to feel one’s belonging to a family and clan, acts as a kind of connecting link, and prevents the disunity and alienation of people in the modern world.

That is why SVRT, an organization engaged in the promotion of genealogy, considered it its duty on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War to restore the names of ordinary soldiers - heroes of the Great War.

The idea of ​​systematizing the losses of lower ranks in the First World War came to us back in 2010. From that moment on, the search began for documents where this data would be reflected.

According to available information, lists of losses compiled during the First World War are now stored in regional archives in the funds of provincial boards. They are also available in the collections of the largest libraries in Russia.

About two years ago, these lists began to be posted on the electronic resources of the Russian State Library and the Tsarskoye Selo online library. There were also enthusiasts who began processing the lists, but most of them were engaged in sampling only for a specific district, at best a province, or the processed lists were subject to various kinds of conditions limiting free access to them.

Seeing this state of affairs, the Union for the Revival of Genealogical Traditions decided to optimize all publicly available lists and make them available to everyone. The work was based on the alphabetization of lists for the territories of the Russian Empire. This principle of processing lists allows you to quickly search for the person you are looking for. We first turned to these lists in August 2012, and since August 2013, the project “The First World War, 1914-1918” began to be systematically implemented. Alphabetical lists of losses of lower ranks.”

We began to form a team of volunteer helpers for this project, and volunteers who wanted to help in its implementation began to actively join us. The project was headed by SVRT member Nikolai Ivanovich Chernukhin, a doctor living in the Stavropol Territory, on whose shoulders the main work of implementing the project fell.

Currently, the project is working in full force, the lists are being actively processed and posted on the SVRT website for free access. 59 volunteers are participating in the project: these are both members of our Union and simply people living in our country and abroad, united by a common goal.

Thanks to the active participation of such volunteers as Bogatyrev V.I., Gavrilchenko P.V., Efimenko T.D., Kalenov D.M., Kravtsova E.M., Myasnikova N.A., Naumova E.E., Shchennikov A. N. and many others, the project has practical content and is nearing completion.

At the moment, all lists found in the public domain have been sorted out and are being worked on. Of the 97 territories on the lists, 96 territories have already been processed and posted on our website. The formed database already contains information about more than one million people of lower ranks, and each of us can now look for our relatives there.

The lists posted on the websites of the previously mentioned libraries contain information about approximately 1 million people, and in total about 1.8 million people were taken into account.

Unfortunately, not all lists are freely available, but only about half, but work continues, including searching for missing information.

People are already beginning to use our findings, and samples for the relevant territories are being posted on regional websites.

We welcome any help, including providing us with the missing lists. Elena Kravtsova and Andrey Gorbonosov helped and continue to help us with this. Some of the lists were provided by Boris Alekseev.

The actual results of the project can be found on the SVRT website.

All volunteers who have already shown practical results are noted with gratitude by the SVRT Board, some of them were awarded SVRT Badges of the III degree for their selfless and noble work. At the end of the project, the most active participants will be nominated for orders and medals of the Russian Imperial House.

I would like to present our project with the help of a small electronic presentation of scans from the SVRT website. So,

Frame 1. Screensaver of the project from the SVRT website.

Frame 2. On the main page of our website there are buttons for the largest SVRT projects, among them there is a button with the image of a gallant soldier during the war of 1914-1918.

Frame 3. By clicking on this button we are taken to the website page dedicated to this project.

Frame 4. Here we see a brief summary of the project, a list of project participants by name (site visitors should know who prepared the lists of losses for the work). Next is an alphabet of letters: by clicking on one of them, you can get to the page on which the provinces are located, the name of which begins with the corresponding letter. Just below the alphabet is a reminder that the territorial division of the Russian Empire is not in all cases identical to the modern one. For people involved in genealogy, this is an obvious thing, but for the rest of the Internet users it is not at all true.

Frame 5. By clicking, for example, on the letter “O” we see three provinces at once: Olonetsk, Orenburg and Oryol. Next, you should click in the corresponding province on the letter with which the desired surname begins.

Frame 6. Now we get to the pivot table. The table contains several columns with persons corresponding to the corresponding letter. Column names: title, full name, religion, marital status, county, parish (settlement), reason for departure, date of departure, number of the published list and page in the list.

Frame 8. Why did a person end up on the list of casualties twice? From the list data it follows that on May 31, 1915 he was wounded, but left in service, and on July 16 of the same year it is recorded that he was wounded and apparently sent to the hospital. I easily found his potential father, Stepan Yakovlevich, in my database. Having compared the dates of birth of the hero’s sisters, brothers, and nephews, I understood why he was not included in the family tree earlier. Georgy Stefanovich probably did not return to his native village after the war, and there could be several reasons. Perhaps the “whirlwind of the revolution” radically changed the person’s fate, or perhaps he was mortally wounded, which is why he was not included in the 1917 election lists, which I looked through in the archive. Now I know that Georgy Stefanovich Bibikov is my second cousin, a participant in that “forgotten war.” This kind of indirect genealogical information can be obtained from these lists, i.e. these lists are a good addition to the well-known OBD-Memorial database, which we all actively use. But, of course, the main goal of working on the lists is to list by name the undeservedly forgotten heroes of the First World War of 1914-1918.

Frame 9. The SVRT forum page is presented. You can follow the discussion of the project, its developments, additional information on the project, as well as participate in discussions, conversations and debates on our forum.

Frame 10. The most active participants in the project are awarded with our award, the “SVRT Project Participant” badge. The badge is approved in three degrees and is awarded for each project separately. The picture shows the 3rd and 2nd degrees of the sign. Currently, 20 project participants have been awarded this badge.

Join our project, remember your great-grandfathers!

Bibikov V.V. — President of the Union for the Revival of Genealogical Traditions, member of the Public Council at the Federal Archival Agency, member of the Council of the Russian Genealogical Federation, full member of the Historical and Genealogical Society in Moscow.