With the help of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, an electronic bank was created "The feat of the people in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945." which is located at podvignaroda.mil.ru , on it you can find information about the exploits and awards of your fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers by name and surname. The search is carried out according to military archival documents that have been digitized and entered into the site's database..
How and where to look?
The site "Heroic deeds of the people" is the most complete and up-to-date database on the participants of the Great Patriotic War - there is information about almost all the soldiers. At the first stage of digitization from 2010 to 2015, 30 million records were made on the awarding of orders and medals "For Courage" and "For Military Merit", as well as information on 22 million Orders of the Patriotic War of I and II degrees for the 40th anniversary of Victory, and also 200 thousand archival files with a total volume of 100 million sheets!
Such a huge amount of work has been done for the main goal of the project:
The main goals of the project are to perpetuate the memory of all the heroes of Victory, regardless of rank, scale of feat, status of the award, military-patriotic education of young people on the example of the military exploits of their fathers, as well as to create a factual basis to counter attempts to falsify the history of the War .
Below you can learn more about the site's capabilities..
There are 3 main search options:
- Search for people and their awards
- Search for decrees and orders for rewarding
- Finding data by location and time
To find a person, use the first search option, for this open the site http://podvignaroda.mil.ru/ and go to the "People and awards" tab and enter the last name and first name of the person whose awards you want to find.
To search for decrees and data on the place of hostilities, we advise you to use another site - "Memory of the People", which will be described below. If you want to search by the award number, you will not be able to do this, because the award numbers are not indicated in the awarding documents..
If the information about the fate of a person is not known, then the "People's Feat" site will not suit you, because it does not contain data on the dead or missing. Such information should be found on the site www.obd-memorial.ru, trying different spellings of surnames and first names. wartime documents could contain errors in the name or date of birth.
Recall that the initiator of this project is the Department of Information and Telecommunication Technologies Development of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and technical support is provided by the ELAR company. Thanks to them for this site!
Information is taken from two funds: the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (CA MO) and the Central Naval Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation (TsVMA).
Memory of the people
Later, a more modern site https://pamyat-naroda.ru/ "Memory of the People" was opened with documents of the Second World War, which has a nicer 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 restore the combat path of your grandfather, to find documents on wounds and awards.
The Memory of the People project was implemented in accordance with the decision of the Russian Victory Organizing Committee of July 2013, supported by the instruction of the President and the Decree of the Government of Russia in 2014. The project provides for the publication on the Internet of archival documents and documents on 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, the WDS Memorial and the People's Feat into one project - Memory of the People.
On the page https://pamyat-naroda.ru/ops/ you can see plans for 226 operations with detailed schemes on the map. Each page about the operation contains the names of the commanders and the numbers of the military units, as well as a description of the result of the operation.
Figure 1 - Modern map of military operations during the Second World War.
On the page https://pamyat-naroda.ru/memorial/ you can find military graves in your city. It is enough to enter the name of the city and click the "Find" button. In total, there is information about 30,588 burials around the world, except for the United States.
Figure 2 - Military burials with names and surnames.
The page about the burial contains information about its condition (good, bad, excellent), the type of burial, the number of graves, the number of known and unknown burials. Also on the page is a list of buried persons with names and dates of birth and death.