DOI: 10.18503/2658-3186-2022-6-3-21-28
Abstract. This article attempts to analyze the process of burial of fallen Red Army soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. In our opinion, the relevance of the work is beyond doubt, because the ongoing conflicts in the modern world and, as a consequence, deaths of soldiers raise the questions of morality. So, there is the problem of fallen soldiers and the issue of their dignified burial among them. Despite some challenge studying and understanding history is quite promising in order to outline a number of lessons for modern time experience. Only the process of democratization of Russian society, the declassification of a number of archival documents, a powerful wave of development of the Russian search movement has recently made it possible to look at it more objectively. During the research the author came to the conclusion that the practice of servicemen burial in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War often was not consistent with existing legal norms. This fact is confirmed by numerous testimonies of veterans and archival documents. The Red Army regulations did not take into account the realities of 1941, when heavy human losses, the intensity of fighting, long retreats, difficult climatic conditions and a shortage of equipment did not allow the funerary commands to do/follow all parts in rules. In spite of the control and directive instructions from the superiors thousands of Soviet soldiers were left unburied or buried without proper honors in the woods, fields, and heights. The situation adversely affected the soldiers’ morale and partly undermined the combat effectiveness of our army. With time, when the situation changed for the better, the situation with the burial of the Red Army soldiers changed, but still all the violations could not be eliminated until the end of the war.
Keywords: World War II, USSR, Great Patriotic War, military entombment, modern history.
Author:
Artem E. Lyubetsky, Ph. D. in History, associate professor at the Department of World History, Institute for the Humanities, Nosov Magnitogorsk State Technical University, Magnitogorsk, Russia; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
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For citation
Lyubetsky A. E. Burial of Red Army Soldiers During the Great Patriotic War: Legal Norms and Practice, Gumanitarno-pedagogicheskie issledovaniya [Humanitarian and pedagogical Research], 2022, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 21–28.