Annotated Lists of Participants of the Great Patriotic War Conscripted from Kalmykia: a Historiographic Review

Abstract

The article provides a historiographic review of Memorial Books and other published annotated lists of participants of the 1941–1945  Great Patriotic War that were conscripted from Kalmykia. The mentioned editions serve as the most important and key  element in the system of memorialization of our fellow countrymen’s  deeds of valour in the defense of Motherland since those personalize each of them. At the same time, the fi gures they  cover are considerable enough and sometimes amount to 100 %. The review allows to conclude that huge work on compiling and  publishing the diverse annotated lists of our fellow countrymen has  been conducted in the past decades but the post-Soviet editions are  not that comprehensive and, as a rule, specialize in some certain  aspect. E.g., there are separate annotated lists of our country fellowmen who were killed in action, died from wounds, missed in action, who were captured, deported to the Shirokovsky forced  labor camp or awarded, who survived to a certain date or came from a certain district (including those related to the neighboring regions nowadays) or settlement; warriors of ethnic military units.  According to population coverage, the editions can be roughly  divided into three groups as follows: regional (those covering the  whole population of the region), district (those covering the  population of a separate district) and village (those covering residents of a certain settlement) ones. So, a complete and comprehensive annotated (or unannotated) list of Kalmykia’s  residents — participants of the 1941–1945 Great Patriotic War has never been compiled and published. Unfortunately, the lists are  incomplete, contain duplicated data and signifi cant mistakes in the spelling of personal names. In view of the restricted access to  archival materials it was not always possible to introduce  corresponding corrections. A number of published lists had been  compiled without due account of the actual documents and contain lots of essential mistakes. Ever since ODB Memorial and Podvig  Naroda (‘People’s Deeds of Valor’) integrated online databases  (search engines) started working, it is possible to correct the  mistakes and create a new Memorial Book that would contain  consolidated, verifi ed and correct data about all the previously  described individuals. To achieve the goal it is necessary to perform  tremendous work on developing a consolidated database including information on all our fellow countrymen — participants of the Great Patriotic War, i.e. to compare and analyze data, eliminate repetitions, search for previously undiscovered archival materials and introduce  them into scientific discourse (to be later processed using computer  technologies). In view of the aforementioned, it can be concluded  that the task of memorialization of our fellow countrymen’s deeds of  valour in the battlefi elds of the Great Patriotic War has not been  fully completed yet.