Search work on the battlefield remains of nurses. Search work for the remains of Soviet soldiers in the area of ​​meat forest

Features of search seasons.

The most favorable for field search work are the end of April and May. This is the time when the ground has thawed from winter frosts, but is not yet covered with vegetation, there is no foliage on the trees, at this time the surface of the earth is clearly visible, maximum visibility in the forest area greatly facilitates the possibility of visual orientation. The only inconvenience during this period is the high groundwater. However, it is groundwater that assists an experienced searcher in the search. This, at first glance, paradoxical, but very interesting feature will be discussed in detail in the chapter “Search for Unaccounted for Burials”.

In the summer months, search work is mainly hampered by lush vegetation and an abundance of mosquitoes and horseflies.

Another, most favorable period is autumn. Although it is not entirely correct to call this period autumn, because. for the most part, search operations begin in the second half of August, at a time when they are not difficult due to tall grass. And yet, since mainly young students take part in search work, the second half of August is most suitable for students and schoolchildren to participate in search expeditions.

However, those who have the opportunity to work in the golden time of autumn - September, when the grass begins to fall, the leaves fall off, the rains stop, and the forest becomes indescribably beautiful and the cold has not yet come - go on a search at this time. Later - in October - it becomes colder, but October is more favorable for a successful search. At this time, foliage falls off to a greater extent, tall grass spreads, which facilitates movement, accessibility and visibility. But in October, search operations no longer have a mass character, they are mainly carried out by local groups and are in the nature of a day off. As in fact, in all subsequent months until the onset of spring.

November is convenient for reconnaissance trips. At this time, frosts set in, the ground is covered with an ice crust, which greatly facilitates walking through wetlands and makes it convenient to make trips over long distances. The foliage by this time falls completely, there is still no snow cover, and the forest becomes light and perfectly visible. At such a time, it is already quite difficult to clear the ground if you happen to find a "rider" killed. However, in the forest area closed from cold winds in November, the soil is just beginning to freeze. Therefore, in a light frost, it's time to open an unaccounted-for burial in a low-lying place, where groundwater replenishment makes work much more difficult or impossible at other times.

It is generally accepted that search operations are impossible in winter. In the usual sense, this is indeed the case. However, it is in winter that experienced searchers find some advantages in performing search tasks. Sometimes, when the conversation turns to work in the winter, those who do not have work experience during this period express bewilderment or surprise, they say, how can you dig in winter, because it's cold! And it's all covered in snow! Of course, it is not hot, but this is the advantage over hot weather. Below, in the excavation in mild frosts, the temperature is above zero, and the worker is, as it were, in a bowl - a semi-closed volume with a positive temperature, and even in a constantly moving state. So during work at such a time you should not dress especially warmly - it will be hot. Of course, one cannot do without shoveling snow in winter. But on frosty days it is quite possible to get to the bottom, for example, to the bottom of a funnel in a peat bog.

Work at this time of the year should be carried out at a pre-surveyed site, where there are all signs of interesting and useful finds or the possibility of exhuming the remains of the dead. Work in heavily swampy areas should be started after good frosts, when the water freezes to the maximum. The ice is cut down and chipped off by ice picks, but it is much more convenient to do this with a chainsaw. Ice should be removed by sawing it in pieces starting from the center. For the convenience of removing pieces of ice from the water, you can use a search hook or make a special grip of the simplest design. To make it convenient to catch pieces of ice from the water, before chipping it off, a slot is cut through or sawn through in the center of the intended piece for the entire thickness, into which a hook or grip is launched and rotated at a right angle.

After removing the required amount of ice, water is pumped out using a motor pump or buckets. The edges of the drained funnel freeze over after some time, which significantly reduces or completely stops the recharge of groundwater. Further work is carried out in the usual manner.

A significant disadvantage of working in winter is the short daylight hours. Therefore, if the amount of work exceeds the cost of time by more than one daylight hours, it is necessary to solve the problem of lodging for the night in advance and do the work, having previously thought through its stages.

When deciding to carry out such work, it is useful to ensure that the team has one or two people with practical experience in working in the winter. For those who have the appropriate training and equipment, it is not a problem to spend the night in a tent. It is advisable to get to the place of work on wheeled or tracked vehicles equipped for autonomous existence. If it is possible to spend the night in a nearby settlement, then this option is most preferable.

In winter, it is much more convenient to examine large craters for the detection of military or sanitary burials. In summer, for these purposes, it is necessary to use a rather long and, consequently, heavy hook, the ground is probed at a large angle, which requires significant significant physical costs and, accordingly, does not allow it to be done efficiently. In winter, when the ice becomes strong enough, to examine an object filled with groundwater, it is enough to cut a hole anywhere with a pick or an ax.

If, as a result of the inspection of the funnel, it is established that its contents are of interest to search engines, and a decision is made to work on it, it is necessary to perform all the necessary preparatory administrative and organizational measures, because attempts to perform such work "with kondachka" usually end in failure.

Search tool.

For successful work during the period of field work, the searcher needs the skills of using a probe, as the main tool in the search. This, in fact, is not a very tricky science, however, it would be very useful for the leaders of search formations (especially rear regions) to conduct classes with novice search engines to master this tool even before leaving for the expedition. For this purpose, in addition to theoretical training, it is useful to organize practical exercises at impromptu training grounds. One educational and practical lesson can replace many explanations "on the fingers". For successful work in the search, it is important to learn how to determine the type of found object by sound and elasticity. For this purpose, the “trainer” can bury any objects made of a material similar to the most frequently encountered objects in the search, similar in shape and volume, into the ground. A soldier can carry a helmet, gas mask, grenades, cartridges, a rifle or machine gun, a bowler hat, a mug, a flask (the flasks were aluminum and glass), etc. From uniforms, shoes or their fragments are most often found. It is mainly leather and rubber. Finds brought from previous expeditions can also be teaching subjects. Instead of a bowler hat, you can bury any old pot, instead of a gas mask - a piece of automobile rubber, etc. In the search, there will certainly be items that are not related to items of soldier's equipment, these are mainly stones and tree roots. Therefore, it is worth practicing how to determine the sound of stone and wood with a probe. In this case, the main attention should be given to training in the detection of bone remains.

During training, it is advisable for each searcher to use an individual probe. After some training, the search engine will remember that each object has its own, characteristic only to it, elasticity and the sound it makes when touching it with the tip of the probe.

Probe for mounted search it is made of a steel springy bar with a diameter of 6-8 mm, a length of 60-70 cm. The simplest and most practical way to manufacture such a tool is as follows. A bar of the indicated dimensions is taken, one end is made somewhat pointed for hammering (planting) into the butt of a wooden handle, which is made from a young tree of a suitable size in length and diameter. The second, working end cannot be sharpened at all, because. the sharp end will easily pierce and spoil a non-solid find, will get stuck in the roots of trees, which quickly tires and annoys. In addition, a sharpened probe runs the risk of piercing your own leg. The length of the handle is made according to individual desire and based on the need. With a short handle, it is convenient to walk through the forest and search for riding remains in explored areas, while an elongated one is convenient when examining shallow and water-filled craters. For the manufacture of the handle, it is necessary to take a living tree, preferably a viscous breed, because. dry wood will certainly split when a bar is mounted. Aspen for these purposes is not suitable even alive. It is better not to remove the bark from the lower half of the handle for a couple of days until the wood dries. This will keep it from cracking. For reliability from cracking, the junction of the bar and the handle can be fixed with a metal clamp or clamp. At the end of the search work, the handle can be knocked down, and the bar can be easily packed into a backpack. When packing, the ends of the rod must be wrapped on both sides with a hard material (for example, rubber) in order to protect themselves from accidental injury. The manufacture of other probe designs is also practiced. For example, a metal tube is attached to a bar by welding, a wooden handle is inserted into it, which quickly breaks at the junction. They also make an all-metal probe. For this, an elongated bar with a T-shaped welded handle is taken. Such a probe, if it is short, is impractical because during a horseback search you have to bend over more often than necessary, it does not allow you to examine small funnels with water, while a long one is too springy in the search, and if the steel is not elastic enough, it simply bends. Attempts to solve these problems due to the thickness of the bar turn into an inconvenience in the weight of the stylus. In addition, during transportation, such a probe creates certain inconveniences.

Depth probe is an indispensable tool for searching and examining unrecorded military graves. It is a rod made of springy rolled metal, 7-8 mm thick, on one side of which a piece of tube serving as a handle is attached perpendicular to the rod by welding, and on the other, a thickened tip, which should be 3-4 mm thicker than the main rod. The tip is necessary to reduce the frictional resistance of the soil against the probe rod, which is achieved by increasing the diameter of the hole in the ground with the tip when it is pushed into the ground with sharp shocks. The tip is made in various configurations, depending on individual preferences or tasks performed and the structure of the soil being examined. The tip of the drill will help to take a soil sample from the depth that the probe has. The bullet-shaped tip makes it easier to work on hard and dry soils. In wet and peaty soils, it is enough to weld a ball or simply weld a thickening. In any case, the tip must not be sharp, as will pierce loose finds. As practice has shown, the most optimal length of the deep probe is 130-150 cm.

Hook. In the search world, the hook has become widely popular as an auxiliary tool for establishing the presence of the remains. This is a metal bar, curved on one side in the form of a small hook. It is made of metal, similar to a deep probe, in two versions. The so-called stationary and mounted. The first option is a hook of arbitrary length (at the request of the owner) with a welded steel handle tube at the second end of the bar. Usually take a length of 1.5 to 2.5 meters. This length of the hook allows you to explore funnels of small and medium diameter. Too long hooks are difficult to transport, especially when you have to get to the place of prospecting public transport. Another option, the so-called mounted, shortened hook - with a small, instead of a handle, fixing bend of about 2 cm. Such a hook is made 1.3-1.5 meters long. Its main advantage is the ability to study any diameter and any depth of the funnel. To do this, depending on the need, a pole of the required length is cut down directly at the site of the prospecting work, preferably from a thin birch. On the butt side, the pole is hewn to a length of 40-50 cm and a hook is attached to the overlay, hammering the bend into the wood and fixing the point of contact between the hook and the pole along the entire length with metal brackets and wire or a strong rope. The working bend of the hook is made in an oval, with a diameter of 3-5 cm, according to individual wishes. At the same time, it should be remembered that the larger the diameter of the bend, the more difficult it will be to break through the layer of packed soil over the occurrence of bone remains or other objects at the bottom of the funnel and it will be more difficult to hook any object. It is better to make such a hook from springy rolled steel, 8-10 mm thick. Experienced searchers prefer to have both hook options. However, more often it is still necessary to examine the soil in such places where the length of the stationary tool is sufficient. A hook with a welded metal handle is much lighter and more comfortable when moving through the forest. When searching for and examining small craters, it is more practical to “take note” of large craters, and then purposefully examine them with a hook hook.

Metal detector. Much time has passed since the end of hostilities, nature and time carefully hid the traces of those events. The search for the remains of soldiers is becoming increasingly difficult. Since every soldier certainly had some kind of metal objects with him, then good helper the search engine became a metal detector.
Currently, there are many varieties of them - from proton magnetometers to toys capable of reacting to metal for children. Modern imported models have different prices depending on the electronic “bells and whistles” and, accordingly, technical characteristics. In the search environment, they are classified as "treasure hunters", "beach" and "children's". When choosing a metal detector model, it is difficult to say which one should be preferred. Each search engine is guided by individual preferences, using certain advantages of a particular model, resigning itself to its shortcomings. Modern metal detectors are usually easy to use and light in weight. These benefits are well felt by the end of the day spent in the search. But all of them have one drawback - they are extremely sensitive to humidity and are made of insufficiently durable materials, which is impractical in relation to the conditions of search work - transportation, operation in extreme conditions. Many prefer our domestic "poker" - the good old army IMP. It is not very convenient to use, heavy compared to others, but strong enough, because it is made with the harsh military life in mind and rarely fails in work.

Early 1980s. Homemade metal detectors worked

no worse than modern expensive ones.

If you can’t afford an expensive “bourgeois” metal detector, and the IMP doesn’t suit you or you don’t have the opportunity to purchase it, but you want to have a minik, you can get out of the situation in the following way. In the Radio magazines in the seventies and later, schemes and drawings of home-made metal detectors were published. They have characteristics that are not inferior in sensitivity to IMPs, to all “children's” and many “beach” ones. The scheme of these devices is very simple, it is easy to make it yourself, having only the basics of knowledge in radio electronics. Such a tool is easy to transport, has a low weight and, if not made in haste, it will work reliably. Your humble servant in the old days, having only the basics of knowledge in radio engineering, independently made such a device and was pleased with it for a long time. Go to the library, find a diagram, and you will not regret if you make it. Get "cheap and cheerful."
In the detachments, metal detectors are available in single copies, but the skills to use them will not interfere with each member of the expedition.
When the device reacts to metal, the signal power is estimated, which gives some idea of ​​the mass or area of ​​the detected object. Then, using a probe, determine the exact location of the detected object and its dimensions. Then, with a sapper shovel or knife, they cut it with a square and remove part of the turf to visually determine the type of object found. It is clear that these measures are necessary in case a GP may be found in the ground. This is first. Secondly, it will be annoying if you damage an interesting find. This happens often, even medallions fell under the bayonet of a shovel. And there are countless interesting finds spoiled by a reckless search shovel that ended up next to an unnecessary piece of iron, for example, glass flasks, which are now becoming a rarity.

Boer. As an auxiliary tool when examining the soil, it is very useful to have a drill that has not received worthy recognition from the search engines. This tool will be a good alternative to a shovel when it comes to digging the ground. It will save you a lot of time and effort. In addition, the drill is an excellent helper in the arrangement of the camp. After all, there is always a need to dig in poles or racks for the manufacture of "furniture" and a frame for a canopy.
To make such a tool, of course, you will need the help of a professional welder, because. the industry produces them rarely and usually in unacceptable sizes for our purposes. You can make a drill of two types. One type is a screw (auger), similar to the design of an ice drill for winter fishing. The difference between the fishing drill and the one used for drilling the soil is only in the handle with which the drilling is carried out. The drill for soil has a short tube welded on the upper side, into which a handle is inserted - an extension cord to facilitate the rotation of the auger part.
Another, simpler option is the framework. For its manufacture, a metal plate 40-50 mm wide, 3-5 mm thick is taken and bent in the form of a frame, i.e. the letter "P". A pipe is welded to the crossbar of the frame, which is the core of the drill. The lower ends are connected by welding with two equal plates at an angle outward, asymmetrically relative to each other and perform the function of knives having a shape similar to a screw design. The lower edge of the knives has a one-sided sharpening.
The diameter of the soil drilling will depend on the length of the upper crossbar of the frame. Both designs can be used in any soil, however, they still have some differences. It is more difficult for a framework to choose soil in dry sandy soils, but adding water to the hole to moisten the sand will help to get out of the situation. Screws are more difficult to work in clay soils. Only replacement of the design of the drill or diligence in work will help here. The drill rod is made of a pipe long enough for comfortable work of a person of average height. The possibility of drilling depth is determined by additional elbows and their number. Elbows are attached to each other with threaded couplings.

Biolocator (vine). There is another less common search method based on magnetic phenomena, known in science as dowsing. The fact of the existence of dowsing has been proven by science, is widely known in the world, although its nature has not been fully studied, not substantiated, and, perhaps, because of this, is of little use. But people have been using this phenomenon for a long time, for example, they are looking for an aquifer when choosing a place where to dig a well, they determine a comfortable place for building a house, a bathhouse, etc. In the old days, a split rod of a vine was used as a biolocator, hence the initial name.
This method is also known in search circles, but does not have wide popularity, probably because the search for "vine" belongs to the category of something supernatural, inexplicable. It is believed that this method can only be used by people with unusual abilities. Meanwhile, it is available to everyone, you just need to practice a little and study your individual "characteristics". The author at one time treated the "vine", let's say, without trust, until he himself tried to use it. It turns out that "the casket just opened." It's all about physics and our lack of knowledge in this science. Everyone knows that a person is a conductor of electric current. This means that it has a magnetic field that is characteristic not only of metal. And if so, why is it not a metal detector, the principle of which is magnetic induction? Two metal bars in the hands of a person are a magnetic coil that creates an inductive field and is able to respond to all electrical conductors, including metal-containing stones, water and human bones. Due to the fact that the above has different conductivity, the "vine" will react to conductive objects in different ways. Depending on the strength of the induction, the frames in the hands of a person can diverge, converge, rotate or deviate in one direction. It all depends on the individual characteristics of the one who holds and how he holds the bars in his hands. The results are also influenced by the material chosen for the frames, its length and thickness. To make such a tool is nowhere easier. To do this, take two pieces of wire and on one side bend at 90 degrees to the length of the palm. These will be handles with the G form variant. If bent in the shape of the letter P, then you need to hold the frames by the crossbar, in arms extended in front of you, from each other at a distance of 10-15 cm, in palms freely clenched into a fist. The length of the "vine" is arbitrary, approximately in the range of 30-50 cm. In order for the rotation of the locators not to depend on the resistance of the palms, tubes of suitable diameter are put on the handles of the frames.
Walk with such a tool over a stone, a metal object, a puddle, bone remains, or just past a person. Try copper and aluminum "vines" and choose the most suitable for yourself. During the test experiments, remember on what object the bars cross, diverge, or rotate around an axis. Then demonstrate your abilities to the surrounding search engines, which will certainly surprise many.
It should be borne in mind that it is problematic to conduct a free search with this method, since the “vine” will react to a variety of objects, often of no interest to us. Therefore, it is recommended to use the "vine" when examining a specific area. It would be quite reasonable in this way to make a preliminary survey of places with signs of old earthworks in order to detect sanitary burials and buried metal objects. This method has proven itself well when examining a planned cemetery to determine the rows and number of individual graves.

Knife and shovel. In the course of cleaning up the remains and lifting material in the excavation, one cannot do without a knife. For these purposes, any durable knife is suitable, preferably with a short and wide blade. It is more convenient in work and storage, there will be no problems with it when meeting with the police. To store and carry a knife in search, you must have a sheath or sheath.
And finally, the most important tool is a shovel. The most practical in horseback search and when clearing the ground is the army MSL - a small sapper shovel (in search jargon - “laper sopatka”). If one side of her bayonet is well sharpened, then if necessary it will be convenient to use it instead of an ax and even a knife. MSL is indispensable in the search for "mounted" dead and in cleaning up the soil during exhumation work.
However, in situations involving a rough excavation of a significant amount of soil, one cannot do without an ordinary bayonet shovel. Recently, domestic and imported semi-shovels made of titanium alloy, with an all-metal handle and a transverse handle on its top, have appeared on sale. Such a shovel is convenient for work related to the excavation of a significant amount of soil and in cramped excavations. It is quite light, clay sticks to its blade much less. And these circumstances, as you know, are very significant. Well, for a picky searcher, any bayonet shovel will do.

Graveyard classification.

In the course of field work, the searchers, one way or another, deal not only with unburied ("riding") remains, but to a greater extent with various burials.
The Association "War Memorials" of the Historical and Archival Department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia in the manual for search and exhumation works classifies burials as combat, sanitary, planned, memorial and temporary.
To these should be added medical and natural.
All types of burials can be group (fraternal) and individual.

Battle graves were arranged by comrades-in-arms (colleagues) of those who died spontaneously in conditions when it was not possible to evacuate corpses from the battlefield and observe generally accepted traditions or established ritual prescriptions for the burial of the dead. The dead were buried where conditions were dictated, ready-made recesses in the ground were used as graves - funnels, dugouts, trenches. In this regard, combat burials often resemble sanitary burials. It is possible to distinguish a combat burial from a sanitary burial by some characteristic features. For example, when burying those who died in combat conditions, they tried to observe elementary ethical and traditional norms. The bodies were stacked in an orderly manner, the bottom of the "improvised" grave was covered with spruce branches, before filling the bodies were covered with improvised means. Most often they were overcoats or capes. Documents were confiscated from the dead. However, medallions or other documents often remained with those killed for various reasons. In addition, a medallion with one copy of the insert could remain with the dead, which corresponded to the directive on the procedure for burial.
Combat burials also include places where the dead were buried by chance, due to combat circumstances.
The remains of the dead, accidentally buried, can be found at various depths in places of engineering structures (trench, dugout, dugout, rifle cell, etc.). As a rule, with the remains, as in the case of the "horsemen", there remain all the items that the soldier had at the time of death.

Sanitary burials are burials of corpses in order to prevent the development of infections. Such burials were carried out by both opposing sides by the forces of sanitary and trophy teams, directly on the battlefields or in a shallow rear. For this purpose, the civilian population was often involved, while both their own and others were buried. Places for sanitary burials were chosen based on the shortest distance for transporting corpses. For this, ready-made pits located nearby were used - funnels, trenches, dugouts, silo pits, etc. A characteristic feature of a sanitary burial is the chaotic arrangement of the remains, the absence of signs of compliance with established and traditional rules. In one grave, the remains of the military personnel of both opposing sides and the civilian population can be found.
Top uniforms were often removed from the dead, but not without fail. Documents and mortal medallions are often absent from the buried, but often they remained with the dead. Medallions are mainly found with a single blank (a sign of compliance with the provisions of the directive on burial and the fact that documents for accounting for irretrievable losses are listed as dead and buried). Often, items of equipment and weapons were randomly dumped into such burials.

Planned burials are military cemeteries, under the arrangement of which the command of units and formations assigned specific plots of land as an army, divisional or regimental burial place for dead servicemen.
During the Second World War, the Red Army did not have a full-time service or units in the units involved in collecting the corpses of the dead and burying them. These functions were performed by teams periodically appointed by unit commanders, which corresponded to the "Regulations on the personal accounting of losses and burial of personnel of the Red Army in wartime", introduced by order of the People's Commissar of Defense in March 1941. These same teams, as a rule, were also "trophy". Along with the evacuation of corpses from the battlefields, they were ordered to collect trophies and weapons left on the battlefield. In those cases when the aforementioned provision was properly executed, the corpses of the dead were buried at planned burial sites in individual or group graves. At the same time, ordinary and junior command personnel were buried without a coffin, while officers were ordered to be buried in coffins. From those and others, in accordance with the directive, uniforms were removed for reuse. The documents were taken away.
Relatives were supposed to send a notice in the appropriate form about the place of death and burial of a serviceman. However, practice shows that, due to many circumstances, rare relatives have specific or complete information about the place of death and, especially, the place of burial of a loved one.
The burial regulations required the following information about the buried to be indicated in the “burial book”: biographical data, date of death, place of death, place of burial, number of the grave. In addition, a plan or diagram was drawn up, indicating the numbers of rows and graves, the coordinates of the location of the cemetery on the ground.
In fairness, I must say that for many years of working with archival documents, I came across such detailed information only starting from 1943 and only in the documents of medical institutions. In the documents of military burial points, the numbers of rows and graves were indicated very rarely.
Planned burials are divided into two categories - military and medical.

Medical graves. In the search environment, sanitary burial is often confused with medical burial. And yet, there is a significant difference between them. Medical burials were arranged by the personnel of medical institutions of units and formations of the army, carried out in accordance with the requirements of the directive on burial. Therefore, such burials are also planned. They were arranged in the places of deployment of sanitary institutions - medical care centers (PMP), medical battalions (MSB), rear and front-line hospitals (PPG, KhPPG, etc.) But often, due to combat circumstances, medical institutions of divisional subordination and below (MSB, PMP, sanrots) also arranged group (fraternal) burials, identical to sanitary ones. In difficult conditions for burial, as well as in other cases, funnels, dugouts, etc. were used as graves, corpses in such burials were placed randomly. It is possible to accurately classify such a burial only when it is opened. The fact that the burial is medical may be evidenced by signs of medical care, traces of surgical intervention.

Memorial graves. In the post-war period, commemorative memorial structures were created in places of fierce hostilities and mass deaths of servicemen, dedicated to events historical significance, the memory of the dead, who showed great courage and heroism. At the same time, memorial structures are, first of all, a tribute to memory and do not correspond to the actual place of burial of the dead or their number.
IN last years memorial burials became the place of burial of the remains of the defenders of the Fatherland, which remained not buried at the battlefields and were exhumed by search engines from unaccounted for and abandoned burials.
Such places are a place of mass visits and events related to the memory of the events of the war years.

Temporary burials- places of temporary burial of the remains, until the decision of the necessary measures and delivery to a permanent place of burial.
Temporary burial is an extreme measure and is carried out in case of urgent need, when there is no possibility of their delivery to the place of permanent burial, the date and place of burial are not known. When creating a temporary burial place, it is mandatory to lay down with the remains, isolated from moisture, detailed information about the place of discovery, the exhumation process, the finds and the group that performed this work. This may be a note in any form, and in the ideal case, a copy of the protocol of the exhumation. Such information will exclude the possibility of depersonalization of established names and the burial itself.

Natural burials. These include the burial sites of the dead, the remains of which were accidentally discovered by the civilian population or by groups of pathfinders who conducted unorganized search operations. Here, both unburied remains found nearby and exhumed from any other type of burial can be buried. Spontaneous burials are usually marked on the ground symbolically, with the help of improvised means. Sometimes the improvised tablets indicate the established names of the servicemen, the total number of those buried, and the name of the group that carried out the burial. As a rule, this is the only information, and it is usually not possible to establish other data. Such burials remain unregistered and are not recorded anywhere.

Unburied (riding) remains are the remains found under the vegetative (turf) layer of soil. With the remains, as a rule, there are items of equipment, fragments of uniforms, personal belongings and weapons of a soldier.
The unburied remains of the dead should not always be classified as missing military personnel. Unburied corpses remained on the battlefields due to various combat circumstances and the existing organization of the burial service. As a rule, after military operations, documents were confiscated from the dead by sanitary and trophy teams, fellow soldiers or comrades. The corpses often remained unburied, about which a corresponding entry was sometimes made in the lists of irretrievable losses in the column “burial place”. Usually this entry read "left on the battlefield" or "buried on the battlefield." Often, only the place of death was indicated in the list of irretrievable losses, and in the column “burial place” they simply wrote “the same place”.

Group (fraternal) burials. These include all types of burials, if more than one corpse is buried in the grave.

Individual burials can also refer to all types of burials and are individual if no more than one corpse is buried in the grave.

The statistics of the search results show that of the total number of remains discovered on the battlefields, the unburied account for no more than a third.
Consequently, the search engines deal more with burials of different classifications, and most of the discovered remains are exhumed from burials. Thus, the result of the work of search engines should mainly be considered reburial.
In this regard, it would be appropriate to quote verbatim the Guidance for Search and Exhumation Works of the Association of War Memorials:
« main feature reburial lies in the fact that reburials radically change the information situation - the information that existed about primary burials loses its significance to a large extent. This imposes high demands on the performance of related work. They provide:
- clear documentation of exhumation processes and subsequent burials;
- making changes or additions to the accounting information about the burials of military personnel for this burial, stored in the relevant archives;
- registration of the necessary documents on reburial and their transfer to the relevant departments (military commissariats and self-government bodies);
- coordination of the place of reburial with the local administration and registration in the prescribed manner of allotment of the necessary land plot for burial;
- determination of the responsible organization and procedure for the maintenance of the burial (cemetery);
- entering information about the burial in the appropriate register (passport) of the cemetery, if it existed before, or creating a new cemetery (burial) in the prescribed manner.
Failure to do the above will lead to the loss of its significance of the information available in the archives, often being a thread to restore the names of the buried. And this means that the remains of military personnel will forever be impersonal.

Distinctive features in determining the belonging of the buried and the class of the burial.

A rare search engine with experience has not heard the philistine question: “How do you distinguish ours from the Germans”? In cases with “riding” remains, search engines rarely have problems with this. But when the search engine deals with burial, the question becomes quite reasonable. Insufficiently experienced people have difficulty not only in classifying, but also in determining whether the discovered remains belonged to the army of the Red Army or the former enemy, as well as in the origin of the burial - it appeared in wartime, before the war or at a later time.
To address these issues, use the following features. Each soldier is dressed, equipped, has weapons and ammunition in accordance with the established form and adopted by a particular state. In the event of the death of a serviceman, any items of ammunition, uniforms, documents or identification marks always remain with him.
However, there are situations when during the exhumation of the remains in the burial there are no such distinguishing features.
As noted above, in wartime there was a directive ordering the dead to take off their shoes and outerwear and bury them only in underwear. Therefore, in an uncovered planned burial, there are almost always no distinguishing features that determine the identity of the buried. In this regard, the search engines find themselves in a difficult situation, classifying the burial, and, as a result, they make the wrong decision regarding the expediency and start of exhumation work. Lack of experience, as a rule, is accompanied by neglect to survey the area around the discovered burial, chaotic excavation and exhumation work. Orderliness and attentiveness will always make it possible to detect any distinguishing features that make it possible to determine whether a soldier belongs to one or another army - a pin on bandages, buttons on underwear, splints on fractures, finally, a bullet stuck in a bone, and much more.
The absence of distinctive findings in some cases in itself allows us to draw certain conclusions. For example, if there are no finds in the burial that indicate that the buried belonged to the army of the Red Army or the former enemy, but the nature of the bone damage indicates combat shrapnel or bullet wounds, there are sections of amputated limbs, fragments of splints on bone fractures, etc. - there is reason to believe that this burial belongs to the medical burial of the Red Army. The Germans buried their own in uniform and with personal belongings, so with the remains you can always find at least uniform buttons.
The presence at the bottom of the burial of an abundant backfill with a disinfectant (chlorine, lime) suggests that the dead from infectious diseases were buried here. This may be an infectious diseases hospital or a burial place for the dead during a period of mass infection in peacetime. The presence of characteristic bullet wounds in the back of the head and temple convincingly indicates that convicts or prisoners of war were shot here. In addition, the bullet itself (its caliber and weapon affiliation) will make it possible to draw certain conclusions about who shot whom.
In the absence of signs relating to the wartime period, it can be assumed that the burial belongs to a different time period. These can be burials of the civilian population, the period of repression, and others, up to the ancient ones.

Reconnaissance of places for field search work.

To conduct reconnaissance of unfamiliar terrain, it is advisable to stock up on the topography of this area. It is very useful to have maps of modern and wartime editions. In addition, it would not be superfluous to interview the old-timers of nearby settlements or eyewitnesses of the events of the war years.
Useful information can also be obtained from local trackers, hunters, collectors of forest gifts or forestry workers.
But the most useful information about wartime events is the study of operational documents of units and formations that took part in hostilities in the territory of interest to search engines.
Upon arrival at the places of former battles, after choosing a place for a bivouac, it is useful to conduct a cursory survey of the area in different directions. It will not be superfluous to control the time of movement forward and in the opposite direction. This will make it possible to determine approximately how far was traveled and at what distance the inspection was carried out. Then, depending on the result of the inspection, proceed to detailed reconnaissance. It is better to carry out reconnaissance in small groups (a pair or a trio), whose members are able to independently navigate in forest conditions.
It is better to go on reconnaissance lightly equipped, having, in addition to a search tool, a daily supply of food, orientation aids (a compass or a portable navigation device and a topographic map). It is advisable to distribute the search tool, and, accordingly, reconnaissance tasks among themselves so that each member of the group is engaged in a specific business and is not burdened with an extra tool. For example, one examines the area for the detection of military and sanitary graves, having only a deep probe or a stationary hook in his hands. The other one examines the ground for unburied remains, having a search probe and a metal detector in his hands.
In the course of an intelligence search, success will depend on observation, analytical thinking and, of course, the experience of the searcher. With experience comes an idea of ​​how, for example, a mortar firing point looks like, which is easy to confuse with a dugout, how it differs from the place where the tent was, or how the gun yard looks like.
If the group went to a place where there are remains of dugouts, this may be a sign of the near rear of the front line. Take a closer look at the nearby items, look for them around the dugouts. They will make it possible to determine whose rear it is. The presence and number of spent cartridges will indicate the nature and intensity of hostilities, their approximate duration and the type of troops stationed in the area, in which direction the movement should continue, etc. It is useful to pay attention to the solidity of the construction of dugouts. Near the front line and during a short time of deployment of troops, dugouts and fortifications were built, as a rule, hastily and small in size. If this is a firing point, then by subsidence of the soil it is easy to determine from which side the entrance was and, accordingly, the direction of the rear. An experienced searcher at such a firing point will not fail to determine and inspect the sector of fire, determine the direction of the search by the presence and number of spent cartridges. In forest conditions, machine-gun fire could only be at short distances, therefore, not far from the found machine-gun point (bunker, bunker, OT), the area should be examined to find the remains of the dead.
In close proximity to the front line, there may be remains of observation posts, firing points and engineering barriers. As a rule, in such a place, the remains of rows of barbed wire will be found. Along it, be sure to walk on both sides. "Horse" will certainly be found.
In winter, when defensive lines were occupied for a short time, engineering barriers of defensive lines were often arranged in the form of forest, ice or snow ramparts. This can confuse the search engine in trying to determine the front line, because, of course, you will not find traces of such barriers now.
The discovered firing cells are also worthy of examination for the discovery of the remains of soldiers. Such cells were dug to a depth sufficient for firing in a prone or kneeling position. By appearance and in size they resemble a sagging single grave.
If you went to a series of large dugouts, you need to establish who built them - soldiers of the Red Army or the enemy. This is easy to determine by objects lying on the surface. Large shelters were built, as is known, at a relative distance from the front line and in places where troops were stationed for a long time. If you already have some historical knowledge of the place under study, after establishing the location on the map, it is easy to determine the direction of further progress. And this, of course, is the front line of defense, unless of course your goal is to search for the remains of the dead. If your goal is household army souvenirs, then you are in the right place.
To whom it is more important to find the defenders of the Fatherland left on the battlefield - the course from this place should be towards the front line. If on the way we met incomprehensible structures in the form of bulk hills, similar to dugouts, but no traces of log rolling are observed, these are most likely gun or mortar yards. In addition to bulk structures, there may also be depressions in the ground in the form of short grooves in the form of an obtuse angle - these are stops for the gun bed. Nearby objects, such as caps for charges, can determine the caliber of guns. This will tell you approximately how far you are from the front line. Near the gun yard, you can usually find a dugout where the artillery crew was hiding. The accumulation of craters will indicate the density of fire and the intensity of the battle. Places where fragments of ammunition from company or battalion artillery are often found should be examined with a metal detector to detect “mounted” dead.
In the zone of action of units and formations established by the command, the ways of their movement were determined - roadways. Medical institutions of army and divisional subordination were also tied to the road roads. As a rule, medical institutions were deployed close to roads and on the outskirts of settlements. As you know, medical institutions of all ranks, from field medical aid stations (PMPs) to evacuation centers and hospitals, had their own burial sites. So, PMPs were located in close proximity to the defense line, where the orderlies evacuated the wounded from the battlefield, and where they found the first health care. It is clear that not all the wounded were subject to further evacuation to the medical battalion (MSB), because. died from severe wounds and, accordingly, were buried here. SMEs were located in a deeper rear, at a distance of up to 2-3 km from the front line. To a greater extent, the number of deaths was accounted for by SMEs. Being a medical institution of divisional subordination, the medical battalions wandered after their unit and were deployed in the near rear of the division. Based on this, in the course of reconnaissance or direct field search work, it is possible to make certain forecasts about the possible places of discovery of unaccounted for planned military graves.

Search for the remains of the dead left on the battlefield.

Based on the results of the reconnaissance search, the commander decides where to send the main forces for a detailed survey of the most interesting place. Now the task is to “catch on”, i.e. find the remains of at least one killed person, if this was not possible during reconnaissance of the area. The found remains of a soldier indicate that you are at the target - a place that needs to be examined carefully. An experienced searcher knows that where one dead person is found, there will be another, a third, and so on.
When carrying out work to detect "riding" remains, great care and patience are required. As you know, the safety of bone remains depends on the acidic and alkaline environment of the soil. In acidic soil, which is typical for wetlands, the bones become very loose, and then completely decompose. In such places, all other objects are usually highly susceptible to decomposition, to a greater or lesser extent. But leather goods usually last better than even metal.
Sometimes the searcher is confused by the fact that during the search, along with metal objects, small, as if crushed bone remains are found, and a lot of charcoal is found at the excavation site. This happens in places where forest fires have occurred.
At present, it is quite rare to visually detect characteristic features and determine the location of the "mounted" remains. Reliable signs of such are items of equipment, equipment and weapons of a soldier. As a rule, now they can be detected with a probe or a metal detector. Do not immediately remove the discovered object from the ground. It is more reasonable to clean the turf over this object, to establish what kind of object it is, to inspect at what depth and in what condition it is. This will help determine the degree of danger of the find, whether it was in someone's hands before you, or has not been touched since it was left here since the battle. If, for example, a gas mask (or any other item of a soldier’s personal equipment) is found, and it lies in the position that it could be in a gas mask bag, obviously you are the first person to touch it after its owner. This is a good reason to continue removing the turf layer and the possibility of finding the remains of a soldier. A good omen for a "hook" are often old excavations. If bowlers, helmets, gas masks and mugs are hung on trees and just lying on the surface, this means that search work has already been carried out here. But this does not mean that all the dead are gathered here. If you patiently walk around such places, you can always succeed.

"Horse" search in the zone of engineering barriers.

When you find a rifle, first of all, pay attention to its completeness. If any details are missing, the chance of finding a soldier with her is greatly reduced. The absence of a bolt in the rifle indicates that it has already been in someone's hands and has probably been displaced from its original location. The shutter could be pulled out and thrown aside even during the war by soldiers from a trophy or funeral team, it could be a sapper during demining after the war, or just a “passerby” tracker who had been here much earlier than you. Most likely, there will not be a fighter with this rifle, but this is a sure sign that the nearest district should be carefully combed. If everything is in place, i.e. a rifle with a bolt, fragments of the butt remained, it should be obvious to you that you are the first to hold this barrel in your hands after its owner - most likely the soldier is lying nearby. The rifle, relative to the remains of a soldier, can lie anywhere. But practice shows that quite often the barrel indicates the direction of firing, and the butt - the direction of the search for the remains of a soldier. Therefore, first of all, it is better to feel the turf from the side of the butt. If the remains are not found in this direction, do not be too lazy to once again carefully examine the ground around with a metal detector and a probe.
If during the “mounted” search, undigged items of soldiers’ equipment are repeatedly found, but there are no remains of the dead, it follows that a funeral team worked here and the dead should be searched for in combat or sanitary burials. To do this, first of all, it is useful to check the funnels available nearby. If there are no remains in the craters, or they are found, but in a small amount, and on the basis of available information from any sources it is known that there were much more losses here, it is necessary to examine the area towards the rear from the battlefield at a distance of up to five hundred meters. Depending on the circumstances, funeral teams often carried out mass burials of corpses evacuated from the battlefield no further than this distance. Therefore, burials in the near rear usually look like sanitary or military ones. There may be several graves in such places, not far from each other.

Search for military graves.

According to tradition, it is considered that the burial should look like a kind of elevation of soil that was piled up at the burial site. However, in relation to abandoned and unaccounted for graves, this is not the case. Many years have passed, and now unrecorded planned and individual military burials, for the most part, have become invisible, and a significant part of them, to a greater or lesser extent, look like depressions or dips in the ground. The soil in these places has some distinctive features and characteristic signs. Searching for these signs requires experience and observation. If the dead were buried in winter, then the sinkhole in the ground, as a rule, is more noticeable due to the fact that when the grave was filled in, the frozen ground became less compacted and, over time, gave a significant sediment. Mass graves also gave a significant draft. How large quantity the dead were laid in the grave, the more then the soil gave a subsidence due to the decomposition of the soft tissues of the dead. And vice versa, the failures became poorly or completely invisible where the dead were buried in the summer, the grave is small, the soil in this place is sandy, or subsequently some earthworks were carried out at this place. But since the soil at the burial site was loosened and mixed with the plant layer, even after many years it remains looser than outside its edges and, accordingly, is subject to greater accumulation of moisture. This contributes to the appearance of the distinctive features of such a place in the environment, especially on clay soil. At the end of April, when the snow melts and the sod layer begins to dry out under the warm rays of the spring sun, where the soil is more saturated with moisture, last year's fallen leaves and grass remain wet or still lie in a puddle, and around the plant layer of soil has already dried up. In autumn, the grass in such places is juicier and remains green for a long time. Of course, this does not have to be exactly the burial place. This can look like any place where a hole was once dug and filled up for other purposes.
The search for burials consists in examining the terrain for the detection of characteristic features on the ground. If there are any, the soil is examined using a deep probe in order to obtain additional signs confirming the presence of a burial at the site under study.
When examining the soil, they are guided mainly by the following characteristic features. The loosened bulk soil is compacted over time, and in the process of examining it with a probe, the rod has more or less strong soil resistance, depending on the structure of the soil. If at some depth you feel a lighter advance of the probe rod - a sensation of a short dip or emptiness, then, as a rule, this means that there was once a hole in this place. And emptiness means the presence of looser soil below, which is usually formed as a result of plant or biological humus. In the initial stage of pushing the probe into the ground, the tip will have a fairly strong resistance, so do it with short but vigorous pushes until you feel the touch of the tip on any object.
By the sound of the probe tip touching an object under the ground, if there is one, it is determined what kind of object this object can be. Search engines with sufficient experience often determine this accurately. With a sufficient degree of probability, this can be done by someone who is theoretically prepared and has the skills to work with the tool.
If the probe had the same resistance, i.e. the same density, until it rests on the object, this is hardly a burial. In sandy places, soil compaction is possible without the feeling of failure. But more often, in the presence of bone remains at the bottom of the pit, a short dip will certainly be felt.
With a satisfactory preservation of the bone remains, the moment the probe tip touches the bone will be accompanied by a characteristic sound, which, in practical experience, is remembered quite quickly and easily differs from the sound of other objects that are easily recognized.
Hollow objects (helmet, bowler hat, flask) emit a muffled sound. Tin also makes the sound of a hollow body. With strong oxidation, tin objects can be pierced. The stone has a more sonorous sound than a dense metal object. The sound of hitting the root of a tree is similar to the sound of hitting a bone (which often confuses the searcher), but the hitting the root is more deaf and viscous. Leather or rubber objects have a springy resistance; when touched, they emit a faint dull sound. The rubber springs when touched with a feeler gauge. The skin can also spring, but more rigidly, and with its small thickness it is easily pierced. Dense metal gives a sonorous and very hard sound.
There are burials where the bone remains are in a very loose state, or even completely decomposed. In this state, bone remains can be in a raised position in permanently swampy areas or in burials on sandy, often flooded soil. Therefore, if there is a feeling of emptiness at the bottom of the pit, and if there is no sound of touching the bone, a pit should be made for visual inspection. This, of course, requires a certain amount of patience, accuracy and experience. The use of a drill for these purposes greatly simplifies and facilitates the process of studying the soil. With it, you can quickly take a soil sample.
When examining the area, the search engine can easily be confused by the remains of the so-called "fox holes", which can easily be mistaken for a burial. These are small depressions in the ground, which were arranged by the fighters as a temporary shelter for rest for a short time. On top of a shallow hole, a fighter made a canopy of tree branches or a cape. Sometimes they left some things that are now simple finds. Such burrows were arranged in size, sufficient only to hide from the weather in a lying position and disguise themselves. They are also similar to shooting cells, which can also be mistaken for individual burials.
As you know, in wartime, funnels were often used to bury the dead.
During the examination of large craters, it is necessary to take into account the fact that there will always be a dense layer of soil above the layer of bone remains, regardless of whether the burial was filled up at the time of burial or not. The thickness of the soil layer is the envy of several factors. These can be the diameter and depth of the funnel, the structure of the soil itself. The smaller the funnel, the less it is subject to swimming. In large funnels, a layer of soil influx occurs up to two meters. The largest layer of floating soil is always in the center, as is the layer of bone remains.
In difficult combat conditions, rather large funnels were often used as shelters and defensive fortifications. On the leveled bottom of the funnel, a canopy was arranged for rest, and shooting and observation cells were equipped along the upper edge. Inexperienced search engines, working chaotically at such objects and not monitoring the soil mix during its excavation, usually do not notice such structures and are left without the most interesting finds.
When establishing the fact of the presence of a burial, it is necessary to stop all actions that allow the possibility of damage to the finds, and assess the situation for the expediency and real possibility of opening this burial. It is important to assess whether your strength and experience are enough for qualified work and to complete it in full.

A brief description of the methodology for working with military equipment.

Search work involves not only the search for the remains of soldiers left on the battlefield and the reburial of unaccounted for and abandoned graves. This includes work with military equipment - at the sites of aircraft crashes and loss of tanks.
These combat vehicles make it possible to establish the fate, place of death of military personnel and a specific historical event. This is helped by subsequent work in the archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense. According to the registration numbers of combat vehicles, archival documents in most cases make it possible to establish the names of the crew of a tank or aircraft at the time of the destruction of the vehicle. In aviation, the serial numbers of both the engines and the aircraft themselves were subject to strict accounting. And among the wreckage of the aircraft, you can almost always find the original information. The number of a combat vehicle is no less valuable than a mortal medallion.
In the event of the death of the car, only the numbers of aircraft and engines were indicated in the reporting documents.
Aircraft and engine numbers consisted of a series of numbers indicating the manufacturer's number, year of manufacture and serial number. For more information about this, see the help in the applications.
Attachments and units of the aircraft were also numbered, but this was not subject to strict accounting. Weapons and radio stations were also subject to strict accounting, which were quite often rearranged from one vehicle to another, and therefore could lead on the wrong track.
But if, for example, components or parts for the motor were manufactured at the same factory where the motor itself was assembled, then their numbers could be duplicated and match the motor number. However, as you know, in the Soviet Union there was a practice of manufacturing component parts at factories in various cities of the country, and the assembly of units and engines, as well as their installation on aircraft, at second and even third plants.
The motors had a small motor resource and were subject to repair and replacement, which means they may not match the original registration number. Therefore, the number of the car itself is considered the most reliable for establishing crew names. Aircraft engine numbers should be looked for, first of all, on the crankcase tide and propeller spinner. In these places, the number was knocked out. In addition, a plate was attached to the cylinder block with information about the manufacturer, with the serial number, engine brand and date of manufacture. Tablets with similar information about the aircraft were attached to the cockpit. They were placed, depending on the brand of the aircraft, in places such as the instrument panel, the side or rear wall of the cockpit. For example, on the U-2 (PO-2) aircraft, the aircraft number can be found in the form of a round duralumin plate on the engine hood or on the gas tank. In addition to the above, it should be noted that the aircraft number can be found in the so-called unexpected places, for example, scratched or written in paint on frequently removed components or parts. This is how aircraft maintenance personnel (aircraft technicians) marked their property.
As you know, in fighter and attack aviation, aircraft crews in a critical situation, in order to save, tried to make an emergency landing, because. flying at low altitudes made it pointless to try to escape with a parachute. A relatively successful forced landing could only be performed on a relatively flat area, which the pilots quite often chose a swamp or water surface as. This is fully confirmed by search practice - most of the aircraft discovered by search engines falls precisely on swamps and wetlands. This circumstance is also explained by the fact that from such places in wartime, as, indeed, in the post-war period, the evacuation of an aircraft even with minor damage was very difficult, and in the event of an uncontrolled fall it was practically impossible or did not make sense - the aircraft in a similar situation destroyed beyond repair.
In case of a successful forced landing on a hard surface in wartime, a special evacuation team took the aircraft out for repair in case of minor damage, and in case of severe damage, it was decommissioned. And in the post-war period, if it was in an easily accessible place, it was an object for the procurement of non-ferrous metal.
With an uncontrolled fall on a hard surface, the aircraft engine (depending on the speed and mass of the machine), as a rule, went into the ground to a depth of 2.5 meters, and only the metal parts of the wings and fuselage remained on the ground surface. When the aircraft collided with the ground, the cockpit was deformed, pressing the pilot to the motor. Therefore, as a rule, the remains of the pilot are found above the engine parts.
The presence of aircraft wreckage on the surface of the earth is a sign and a reason to search for a specific place of its fall, which is evidenced by a characteristic pit (funnel). The crater formed during an uncontrolled fall of an aircraft has special features and differs from the crater formed by the explosion of an artillery shell, around which, as is known, an annular parapet is formed. At the crash site, an elongated funnel is formed with a parapet in the form of a semicircle along the fall.
During the war, in the event of the death of a tank, tankers, unlike pilots, seemed to be more likely to escape from a damaged vehicle. In addition, it was easier to find and bury the dead tankers at one time or another. The tanks themselves were evacuated as far as possible for repairs, and in the post-war period they were more accessible for export for remelting. Therefore, at present, it is very rare to find a whole tank on the surface of the earth. Most often this happens with flooded cars - in reservoirs and bogs of swamps. In this regard, search engines often deal with the remains of aircraft and, as a rule, with the remains of pilots.
Performing work on the extraction of flooded combat vehicles requires special training and certain knowledge. To implement the task of extracting a flooded tank or aircraft, complex technical work is required involving heavy equipment and divers. However, its ill-conceived use often fails. Sometimes search engines, wanting to achieve a quick result, using heavy equipment, try to catch on to the largest knots and solve the problem in one fell swoop. But they fail or succeed only in obtaining pieces of torn metal, suitable only for recycling. Work on such objects requires thoughtfulness and patience, does not tolerate haste and fuss.
Practical experience has shown the success of using the following technique for lifting the remains of military equipment from wetlands.
At the site of detection of the object, the maximum possible amount of soil or peat is removed until it is possible to fasten the cable to a large machine assembly.
Then a suspension system in the form of a tripod is built from logs, on top of which a winch or hoist is suspended. Working with a winch is some inconvenience - it is quite heavy. In order to secure it, it is necessary to climb onto the structure, which can be unsafe. In addition, when working with a winch, a person is forced to be under a structure that experiences significant loads, which also poses a certain danger. It is more convenient and safer to use the hoist. It is relatively light, allows it to withstand a significant load, during operation, people are at a safe distance from the loaded structure, the strength of which is difficult to calculate in advance, which is fraught with its destruction.
The loaded end of the lifting device is fixed to a large and strong assembly of the object being lifted and left in a taut form for a long time necessary for the load to be freed from the ground, in other words, to come unstuck.
After withstanding a sufficient time under load, the fixed assembly, which is usually the engine, and making sure that it has come off the ground (this is determined visually by signs of changes in the cable tension and movement of the motor in the ground), if necessary, they hook the cable for a more reliable or a convenient place and begin to gradually lift the object, taking precautions against accident. As necessary, the cable is additionally re-coupled, placing logs in the resulting gap between the ground and the object being lifted, which makes it possible to reduce the amount of cable extension. As soon as the load is at a sufficient height, a flooring of logs or boards is placed under it in the form of a support platform, onto which the load is lowered, while for insurance it is better not to unhook the winch cable, but only loosen it. After that, with the help of transport equipment or a second winch, the cargo is gradually, pulling the traction cable and giving slack to the lifting cable, dragged along a horizontal or inclined line to the prepared site.
When performing such work on solid ground, they dig a hole to the full depth of the aircraft wreckage. To prevent collapse during excavation, the walls of the pit are made in the form of steps and fastened with stakes and spacers. Soil excavation is carried out, adhering to the rules of the method of opening burials, tk. along with the wreckage of the aircraft, it is likely that the remains of its crew may be located here. If it is planned to lift the engine and other large components to the surface, in order to eliminate the need for vertical lifting, one side of the pit is made flat and guides from boards or logs are laid. On such guides with the help of a winch or vehicles, lifting is carried out by dragging.

For many years, the head of the ECC of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Republic of Kazakhstan, Sergey Solodyankin, has been returning from oblivion the names of soldiers of the Great Patriotic War who died in Myasnoy Bor

In April of this year, the head of the Expert Forensic Center (ECC) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Republic of Kazakhstan Sergey Solodyankin again went to the vicinity of the village of Myasnoy Bor Novgorod region- for the annual Memorial Watch. I went not on duty - at the call of my heart, as he has been traveling every year for many years in a row. Search engines raise the remains of soldiers who died in this terrible place to the surface, return their names, and bury them.

This work has been carried out since 1946, but it will still be enough for many, many years: in the Myasny Bor area, according to official data, more than 150 thousand soldiers of the Second World War died in the winter of 1941, in the spring and summer of 1942 alone. shock army. Although there is reason to believe that in fact there were many more dead ...

Myasnoy Bor, Death Valley

Myasnoy Bor is a strange name, creepy. At first, they say, this village was called Meat Boy, because there was a slaughterhouse here. Then the name changed a little, becoming literally prophetic: the surroundings of this place were littered with the bodies of the fallen in the Great Patriotic War for many kilometers.

Until now, you can sometimes hear: Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov surrendered the army, all of it went into the service of the Germans, betraying the Motherland. In general, this is a myth. Especially and there was no one to betray the Motherland in the Second Shock - almost all of its fighters perished in the vicinity of Myasny Bor, in the so-called Valley of Death. Well, those who were taken prisoner ended up with the Germans not at all of their own free will.

... At the end of 1941, during an operation to break the blockade of Leningrad, the Red Army managed to break through the German defenses near Myasny Bor. The fighters of the Second Shock Army moved into the gap that had formed, they advanced towards the strategically important settlement - Lyuban.

In the area of ​​Myasny Bor, a corridor formed, behind which fierce battles unfolded. During the operation - from December 1941 to June 1942, its width varied from 3-4 kilometers to a narrow space of 300 meters. On this "patch" both the soldiers of the Second Shock and the locals who were surrounded fought and died. In June 1942, the survivors tried to break through the ring German troops. During the breakthrough, most of the soldiers died, many were captured. Some managed to reach the Soviet troops.

This is where hell started

What happened in the "Volkhov cauldron" was captured in the photographs by the German war correspondent Georg Gundlach. These photos can be found on the Internet. On one of them German soldiers next to the sign in the Myasny Bor area. It has an inscription in German. It means "hell starts here". The Germans were photographed on the eve of hell, and he himself, all nine of his circles, were where the Second shock fought desperately.

The survivors of this terrible meat grinder shared their memories with the author of the book “Valley of Death. The feat and tragedy of the 2nd shock army "by Boris Gavrilov:

"Extreme natural conditions were supplemented by the constant artillery and aviation impact of the enemy. The Germans bombed around the clock. 2nd shock again began to starve. Salvation was that there were many horses of the Gusev corps, killed in the winter. The soldiers called this food "goose". A former soldier of the 92nd division, M.D. Panasyuk, recalled: “Horse skins were a blessing, we fried them on a fire and ate them like cookies, but it was unprofitable, they began to cook jellied meat. From this slurry, many began to swell and die of starvation.

Former commissar of the artillery battery from the 327th division, P.V. They, as a rule, left their villages and settled in groups in drier places, and in some places even in swamps. An unsightly picture was created: the children ask us for bread, but we don’t have it and there’s nothing at all to treat them with.”

Former nurse of the 59th brigade E.L. Balakina (Nazarova): “The hunger was unbearable, they ate all the horses and sour grass. No bread, no crackers. Sometimes U-2s broke through, dropped crackers in paper bags and mail, as well as leaflets that gave us hope for salvation.

Former senior lieutenant P.P. Dmitriev from the 894th artillery regiment of the division: “Hunger constantly tormented me. From May 30 to June 22, I, as a commander, received an official ration - 5 grams of pea concentrate and 13 grams of crackers ... The Red Army soldiers were supposed to have even less ... To the credit of the division officers, they gave all the products they received to a common cauldron and, along with the soldiers, endured the pangs of hunger ".

Writer V.D. Pekelis, a participant in the breakthrough: “The losses in those battles were huge ...

There is nowhere to bury the dead - all around is deeply frozen ground, trees, waist-deep snow. All clearings, clearings, plots were littered with corpses, they walked along them, sat on them, lay down. When it was required to mark a path in the forest or passages in the snow, instead of milestones, the bodies of the dead were stuck ... "

On the watch of memory

Sergei Solodyankin heard a terrible story about the events in Myasnoy Bor in 1989, when he first came to the Novgorod region for the All-Union Memory Watch. Got there by accident. A friend, the coach of the Youth Sports School from Vizinga Alexander Morozov, gathered a detachment, invited him with him. 26-year-old Sergei, then the second secretary of the district committee of the Komsomol of the Priluzsky district, went.

Of course, he had no experience of searching for the remains. More experienced comrades helped - in the Novgorod region, a search movement was already developed at that time. Volunteer Nikolai Orlov became its founding father, who began search work back in 1946, organized several search teams in the region, and achieved the involvement of the military in the search. He continued his work until his death in 1980.

As Sergei Solodyankin says, both then and now the search engine has three main “weapons”: a probe, a metal detector and a shovel. The search technique was learned on the spot - it turned out to be easy.

At that time, “special signs” also remained on the ground: if a rusted barrel of a rifle or a helmet is visible from the ground, it means that somewhere nearby it is necessary to look for the dead. In the vicinity of Myasny Bor, there were still rusted skeletons of cars, and indeed there were a lot of all kinds of "iron".

S. Solodyankin for the rest of his life remembered the name of the first fighter, whom he "raised" from the earth - Ovechkin. Then he was lucky: he had a soldier's medallion with him, and there are all the data - last name, first name, patronymic, rank.

The search engine from Komi encountered the remains of soldiers for the first time, but did not experience either disgust or fear - only sadness: there was a man, a boy at all, still to live and live, but here, in the swamp, he disappeared without a trace. And only then did the newcomer to the search business understand what it meant to bring back the memory of the missing person. It’s like fulfilling your duty to him: not just an obscure “unit” of the Red Army rotted in a swamp, but a Man with his own destiny, aspirations and hopes, with his life taken away so early, cruelly and senselessly.

Sergey Solodyankin began to go to the Memory Watch every spring. In 1991, he entered the police service, and the very next year he took three difficult teenagers to the Novgorod region. The boys skipped classes at school, swore obscenities, smoked on trifles, windows at school could be broken. The boys did not shy away from work, but they were somehow indifferent to everything - some bones, some pieces of iron ... The turning point came at the end of the watch, when the search engines, who had come to Myasnaya Bor from all over the country (two thousand, there were), lined up at the mass grave, where the remains of the soldiers were buried. The mother of one of the children who died in 42 was also there. She spoke, remembered her son, shed a tear, began to thank the search engines. And suddenly, she knelt before them. And all two thousand people in a single impulse fell to their knees in front of her.

I look at the boys, - says Sergey Solodyankin, - and their tears are rolling. Since then, the boys have been replaced - not a single drive to the police. They grew up to be worthy people.

Pulls, and that's it!

And then those same “dashing 90s” began, and Sergey Solodyankin’s Memory Watch was interrupted - somehow it didn’t work out to go. But at the beginning of the new century, search engines from the Syktyvkar detachment "Link of Times" turned to him, already heading the ECC of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Republic of Kazakhstan. They found a soldier's medallion at the battlefields and asked to read the data. It is clear that over the years since the war, not only the paper has decayed - the inscriptions on the iron medallions have been erased. But experts have both methods and special preparations that help restore these inscriptions.

The expert helped the search engines, at the same time he remembered his Memory Watches. And next spring he went with the detachment to Staraya Russa, Novgorod region - at his own expense, of course. I took a special vacation for this. But the main place of his Memory Watch is still Myasnoy Bor. Now he goes there every year, but he cannot explain why: he pulls, and that's it!

In the new century, the picture in the Valley of Death has changed dramatically. There was almost no “iron” left - in the post-perestroika hard times, people smashed everything to scrap metal collection points. Black diggers at the battlefields also worked: they raked everything clean. Only the bones were left, they do not need them - they do not bring profit.

On the one hand, it became more difficult to work, because the more time passes, the better nature hides the traces of battles - the places where soldiers died are overgrown with grass, trees, burials sink deeper into the swamp. On the other hand, it has become easier: now Sergey Solodyankin has the experience of a forensic expert. By the nature of his service, he was used to small details, “evidence”, to notice. Somewhere the earth sank, somewhere a barely noticeable mound, and there the tree was somehow strangely curved ...

Revived the past

Sergey Solodyankin can talk about the dead soldiers of the Second Shock for hours. He remembers everyone by name, who he raised from the earth, knows who died how. Once we stumbled upon a clearing and found the remains of a Red Army soldier on it. They dug nearby - another one. Then another and another... Only fifteen people, all with weapons. But only one has a rifle. The rest - some with a bayonet, some with a knife, some with a sapper shovel. And it is clear that they went on the attack. All one after another was mowed down by a German machine gunner.

Even the soldiers of the German army remember that in the Valley of Death the most terrible - worse than winter frosts and air bombings - were precisely these insane Russian attacks. Exhausted, starving soldiers, almost empty-handed, went on the attack on machine guns and tanks, ready to kill and die ...

Another time, the searchers dug up a dugout, and in it were the remains of twenty people. It can be seen that the shell hit the dugout, and everyone was immediately covered. The remains were literally collected by the bone. Somehow they raised the bones, it is clear that part of the human chest. But in the same pile, there were other bones - although not human, but very familiar. I didn’t even manage to remember right away - chicken! The identity of the deceased person was established, and the military specialty - a cook ... Where did he get this bird from in that terrible hunger? What was going to cook from it? What did you think about at the last moment of your life? Maybe, falling to the floor, he covered his greatest value with his chest - a skinny chicken, which was supposed to be dinner for twenty people ...

And in the spring of 2011, the remains of a woman were raised from the ground, they found out: a nurse Tamara Bystrova. They found her niece, and she hardly even heard about the missing aunt. But the news of the deceased relative prompted her to study the history of the family, and she learned everything about Tamara. It turned out that she met her soul mate in the war.

She is a nurse, he is a military doctor. They served together and fell in love with each other. They were waiting for the Victory in order to get married and have children. In the Valley of Death, they also ended up together, together they dreamed of escaping from the encirclement.

The remains of Tamara's beloved were raised back in 1991 - they found him at approximately the same place as the remains of the nurse. It looks like they died together. Only then it was "overlooked". But twenty years later, the lovers were united again - in one mass grave.

How did these two die? Now one can only guess about it. But in the book of Boris Gavrilov there is a very similar episode:
"... commander of the 2nd battalion
Lieutenant Pred of the 1265th regiment of the 382nd rifle division left the encirclement together with the military assistant girl Spirina on the night of June 25th. From the explosion of a mine, she lost her leg, his arm and leg were torn off. The young man and the girl simultaneously took out a revolver and a pistol. Two more shots were added to the roar of the battle.

The land of Myasnoy Bor keeps many such terrible stories.

The remains of the fighters - both identified and unnamed - are buried in mass graves. If relatives can be found, they are invited to the funeral. Is it just that all this is necessary for people who sometimes have never even seen their missing relative? Sergey Solodyankin admits: a few years ago it seemed that it was not necessary. But in recent years, something has changed - not only the older generation, but also young people come to the funeral. Although, of course, there are more elderly people, and they experience their loss more acutely.

I remember one case: they found the remains of a fighter, established his identity, it turned out - a Ukrainian. He found a nephew in Donetsk - he himself is already about seventy years old. But I came to my uncle's funeral, relatives from all over the former Soviet Union convened - someone from Ukraine, someone from Russia, someone from Moldova. At their native grave, they mourned together the tragedy of that war - Patriotic for all of them.

Mysticism and more...

They say that Myasnoy Bor has become a zone of chrono-mirages. Like, the concentration of human suffering in this place was so dense that it changed the very structure of space and time. So one hears in the Novgorod forests either German wartime music, or the roar of tanks, or the screams of attackers and the groans of dying people. Villagers say that the ghosts of dead soldiers knock on their houses, asking for food. In the swamps at night they notice translucent figures that float inaudibly over the bog.

Also, the birds don't sing here. Yes, and they are not in the Valley of Death, as if they are specially flying around a dead place.

Sergey Solodyankin is skeptical about mystical stories. I haven't seen a single ghost in all my years. But the search engine admits: there is something strange in these places.

Once we stumbled upon a clearing where our hospital was during the war. Having captured the clearing, the Germans finished off the wounded soldiers and threw the corpses into the funnel. In the same funnel, a pillow happened to be, apparently, one of the wounded was thrown along with the bed. When the search engines unearthed the funnel, they could not believe their eyes. The bodies of the soldiers decayed, but when the pillow was lifted, blood flowed. As if not seventy years had passed since that terrible massacre, but seven hours. Even with his current experience as an expert, S. Solodyankin cannot explain how this is possible.

Another time, the search engines found the remains of an officer in the swamp, and pulled out his boots. And in them - pieces of cardboard, which the fighters put instead of insoles. Naturally decayed, wet - to be honest, it's just pieces of dirt. But Sergei Solodyankin put them in a bag, decided to investigate in Syktyvkar, in case he could find out something. In boots, the officer could hide the documents so as not to lose them.

I forgot about the package at home, after a while I found this slimy lump, brought it to work, studied it, but achieved nothing - dirt, and nothing more! He threw the lump into the wastebasket and went about his business. And after a while I heard a whisper: "I'm here, I'm here ..." The sound was coming ... from the wastebasket.

When the shock passed, the search engine took out a cardboard box from the urn, reviewed it, again found nothing, and again threw it into the basket. I left the office for a few minutes to distract myself - maybe, they say, it seemed to me from fatigue. He just returned and sat down, and from the basket it was already more insistent: “I'm here, look!”

S. Solodyankin admits: he is not a superstitious person, but at that time - his hair stood on end. He dismantled the cardboard in layers, almost laying it out “by molecules”. And I found the miraculously preserved pieces of the receipt. And from them there was a name - Aristarkh Kuziminsky. So one more victim returned from oblivion - an officer of the Second Shock.

"News" from the dead

And other dead soldiers find even stranger ways to “give news of themselves” to their relatives. Sergei Solodyankin is friends with Alexander Orlov, the son of the same Nikolai Orlov, who began search work in Myasny Bor. Somehow they got into a conversation, and Alexander complained: they say, so many documents have been collected, but no one sees them. As they lay in the ground, so now they lie in the archive. We thought about it and decided to publish a series of books. Alexander undertook to prepare the text, Sergey was responsible for photographs and copies of documents.

The books were published at their own expense. The series was called simply - "Documents of War", a total of five books were released. The circulation, of course, was small, but one copy of each was sent to Myasnoy Bor - to the hall of military glory. Well, one day sightseers from Moscow arrived there. They go and look at exhibits. One elderly visitor took a book published in Komi, leafed through it, cried out and fainted. When the ambulance medics brought her to her senses, the excursionist grabbed the book again: here, she says, the father’s signature is on the document.

She said that her father went missing in 1942. Mother all her life tried to find out at least something about his fate, then her daughter looked for data. And suddenly I saw my father's autograph. It was made in 1942, maybe just before his death.

Of course, they gave the book to the daughter of a fighter. Upon learning of this story, Sergei Solodyankin sent her the original document with his father's signature. So the soldier of the Second shock was able to say goodbye to his family.

... The great Russian commander Alexander Suvorov once said: "The war is not over until its last soldier is buried." Today Sergey Solodyankin and his search engine friends are back in the Valley of Death. And maybe, through their efforts, the day when the last unknown soldier of the Great Patriotic War will return his name and find his last refuge has become even a little closer.

Lyudmila VLASOVA (newspaper "Republic").

Photo from the personal archive of Sergei Solodyankin and from the site soldat.ru.

Just a few steps - from the Search for the fallen soldiers of the Great Patriotic War to vandalism and desecration of their memory. What does it take to not cross the line? And why do they sometimes cross the border, and even under the applause of gullible townsfolk? What is "search technology"? About this - in the new notes of Alexander Mazin, a fighter of the search detachment of the Tver region "Generation". .

Constantly on a variety of information resources - in social networks, video hosting, on entertainment sites "with jokes" - there are news about the raised fighters. Screaming headlines. There are also videos from excavation sites, stories about how they managed to find a "helmet with a skull", etc.

Everything seems to be fine, right? And the war is "not forgotten"? Again, "search and patriotic work" is being carried out, and even with the involvement of new information technologies ...

No, friends! If you only knew how much damage such a "search" does! And how barbarously such an amateur "exhumation" is carried out, when soldiers' bones are simply pulled out of the ground and thrown into a common pile. And such unfortunate searchers have nothing to do with personal items (and often they help to identify the deceased warrior!), Or, even more so, with “mortal” medallions. And, of course, the extremely necessary documentation is not filled out, which later allows to restore the history of the death of soldiers and their whereabouts.

It is strange, but for some reason such news is not only met with loud approval, but, I have no doubt, it encourages enthusiasts to repeat all the mistakes when raising the fighters of the Great Patriotic War. And in the end, the very desecration of the graves occurs, in which for some reason the Search Movement, as a whole, is accused.

All this led to the idea of ​​the need to popularize the basic principles and methodology of the Search. To convey to people a simple thought: not every soldier who has raised a soldier's skull or bone from the ground is doing a good deed.

You can, of course, get by with just links to the site of the Search Movement of Russia. There, the whole technique is painted down to the smallest detail. But how often do we read instructions? Therefore, I decided to briefly describe the most correct method of exhuming the remains of soldiers at the moment. Moreover, this method is approved by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

This is necessary for only one purpose: so that thoughtless and barbaric excavations are not repeated, followed by applause from ignorant people who believe that pulling out the skull and large bones, collecting “iron” (helmets, buckles, spoons, etc.) is enough, to rebury the fighter and consider him "returned from the war."

Soldiers of the search detachment of the Tver region "Generation" at the Soldier's Cross

The “Generation” search detachment, of which I am a fighter, like many other detachments operating on the basis of this methodology, is based on the principles of raising fighters while preserving the history of his death and removing all the remains without exception from the place of ascent. With subsequent recording and reburial in accordance with religious traditions.

Search steps:

1. Exploration, detection of a burial place using a deep metal detector, metal probes, and other tools. Identification of the boundaries of the burial site, as often a whole rank of the dead stretches behind one found fighter. There are nuances in the preliminary work with archives, the study of the history of the area, work with the local population, etc.

August 2015. International Military Historical Camp "Volkhov Front". The rise of the dead soldiers of the Great Patriotic War.

Lifting rules are fundamentally important. Exhumation table preparation.

Photo - Natalia Nazarova

2. Creation of an exhumation table at the burial site. This is too often neglected by negligent search engines. The exhumation table is a dug trench along the boundary of the burial site, defined earlier. It is recommended to deepen the trench below the level of the bones (the level is determined by the probe during exploration) for the convenience of further work. The detachment is in the trench, working with the burial. The top layer is removed with careful sifting of the soil to detect small remains (phalanxes, ribs) and personal items. Upon reaching the level of the first remains (the remains can lie at a sufficiently large depth in “stacks”), work is carried out with the help of scoops and brushes. The soil is carefully removed - in order not to move the remains, in order to preserve the picture of the burial. For example, whether the fighters were buried in a trench after an explosion nearby, buried by orderlies in an unmarked grave, covered in a thin layer by the enemy team, or covered by explosives laid around.

During operation, no bones and things are removed or moved.

The top layer of remains has been cleaned. The bones do not move and are not removed.

Photo - Natalia Nazarova

3. After liberation from the soil of the remains of the upper fighter and photographic fixation, moreover, with the assignment serial number(or, provided that further work is difficult), the fighter is raised, with his remains, equipment and personal belongings placed in a separate container. I emphasize: absolutely all the bones belonging to this person. To do this, the soil dump is manually sifted in order to search for the smallest fragments.

Archaeological method of cleaning the remains.

Photo - Natalia Nazarova

4. Logging and work with the exhumation banner. It can be carried out directly at the excavation site or in the camp. Working with a banner consists in laying out the bones on a special anthropological banner, photographing and determining the nature of injuries (intravital, fatal, post-mortem, etc.).

Entry into the protocol of the personal belongings of the deceased soldier. In this case, shaving brush, cups, soap dishes.

Photo - Natalia Nazarova

At the moment when the parade will be held on Red Square in Moscow, in the village of Chudskoy Bor Leningrad region the remains of those who brought the Victory Day closer will be placed in the coffins. Why, 68 years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, they are still not buried?

“I ask myself this question every time we find another soldier. The soldiers lie almost on the surface: only under a thin layer of foliage or moss, many of them with weapons in their hands,” says Fail Ibragimov, commander of the voluntary search detachment “Duty”

Every year on the battlefields of World War II
find the remains of about a thousand soldiers

“And 25 years ago, when we just started working on the battlefields, the remains generally lay on the surface. On my first expedition, we went to a clearing in the forest - and there are dozens of skulls. I still can’t forget this picture,” adds Oleg Arbuzov from the "Reconnaissance" detachment.

According to historians, about 5 million people are still missing during the Great Patriotic War.

Most of the work to search for and bury the remains of the missing soldiers is carried out by volunteer detachments.

"Eliminating Traces"

"We saw bones when we plowed, yes. But we were already accustomed to this. From childhood, they met everywhere. And in the forest, and in the garden, and in the field" - Ivan, a resident of the village of Sinyavino

In the forest, 60 km from St. Petersburg, I stumble over something and realize that it is not a snag. A human bone protrudes from the ground. Nearby lies about a dozen mortar shells, under a thin layer of moss - an anti-personnel mine in working condition.

The mine detector roars even when you bring it to old trees - their trunks are riddled with bullets and shrapnel.

In the ground - unexploded shells and grenades. On the stumps are the helmets of the dead. In the thicket and in the clearings, the lines of trenches and trenches are clearly visible.

Sometimes it seems that almost nothing has changed here since the war. But it's not.

We begin to dig in the remains that have emerged from the ground, and we see that the dead soldier is divided in two by a furrow. Christmas trees are growing in it now.

“A few years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decided to eliminate the traces of the war. They began to plow, build, and plant forests on the battlefields,” explains Ilya Prokofiev, an employee of the All-Russian Information and Search Center “Fatherland”.

"On the one hand, this is a step towards the restoration of a war-torn country, but on the other hand, it is an attempt to forget about the colossal losses of the Soviet Union," he says.

Bag of medallions

There was neither the strength nor the time to properly bury the dead soldiers in the first post-war years, say the residents of the villages near which the fighting took place.

"How many skulls they brought, so many workdays were counted. They are already dead anyway, and we had to feed our family"

Mikhail Smirnov, resident of the village of Pogostye

Women and children dragged the corpses into the nearest ditches or shell holes and covered them with earth. Some tried to mark such caches, but their efforts were soon nullified.

Shortly after the appearance of the decree on the elimination of traces of the war, plowing and land reclamation began on the fields.

In the Novgorod region, a power line was built on the site of the most difficult battles.

Part of the land, on which, judging by the combat reports, thousands of soldiers died and were hastily buried, was planted with fir trees.

The plow constantly touched and turned out of the ground unexploded shells and the remains of the dead, but the work did not stop.

“We saw bones when we plowed, yes. But we were already used to it. From childhood, they met everywhere. And in the forest, and in the garden, and in the field, you understand?” Grandfather Ivan tells me.

In the 1960s, he worked as a tractor driver near Sinyavino. During the war there were bloody battles for breaking the blockade of Leningrad.

“We didn’t have the strength to collect every bone. But after work we went through the arable land, collected the mortal medallions of soldiers. After all, their data is recorded there, the addresses of relatives. Our neighbor Mikhalych somehow scored a whole helmet. He took them to the Tosnensky draft board. , opened the box, grabbed all the medallions there and sent it home," adds the tractor driver.

It is interesting that during the large-scale renovation of the Tosno recruiting office in 1995, a large package with medallions was found behind one of the safes.

Some of them had papers with notes attached to them, others were covered with a layer of dried mud.

Skulls and workdays

Thousands of mines and shells lying in the ground are in working condition

During the war years, funeral teams were created for the burial of the dead at military units.

After the war, this was done mainly by the local population.

At the same time, the provisions and instructions issued in Moscow were sometimes carried out in a peculiar way.

“The village council came to our village to collect the remains. The head of the village council said that he would count the skulls. So we went and collected a bag of skulls. Everything lay on the surface,” says Mikhail Smirnov from the village of Pogostye.

“How many heads they brought, so many workdays were counted. And for each workday, either a day off, or food, or a penny dropped. They are already dead anyway, and we had to feed our family,” he continues.

The forest, unlike the fields, was almost never cleared of mines, so for a long time after the war, local residents went to the thicket only when absolutely necessary.

“When it was completely hungry, ten people gathered and went into the forest to look for food from the dead. The Germans had canned bread. It was very tasty. And ours sometimes had something in duffel bags. "- recalls Alexander Noskov, who worked on the railway near Pogostya.

"The whole forest was full of shells and grenades. I was already older. And the boys played war games with real pistols and sawn-off shotguns. And I brought a grenade to school."

The dead soldiers helped those who survived for a long time. Quilted jackets and overcoats were removed from the dead in order to sew clothes for themselves.

Found weapons, orders and medals were hidden in attics or sold. Later, when there was a demand for German helmets and insignia, they began to pull them out as well.

But the remains of the former owners of all these things continued to lie in the forests.

Beautiful signs

After the war, some trees were planted on top of dead soldiers.

In the late 1950s, a program to expand military burials began.

According to the plan, all graves and sanitary burials, small and remote from settlements, were to be opened, the remains exhumed and transferred to large memorials, which are easier to care for.

But often this only turned into rewriting the names of the dead from one tablet to another.

“Every year we find such mass graves. Soldiers lie with personal belongings, with medallions. We start checking against the database, and they are allegedly buried. Only at memorials tens of kilometers from here,” says Alexander Konoplev, head of the All-Russian Information and Search Center “Fatherland "

"Their names are carved on beautiful granite slabs. But in fact, our defenders are still lying in funnels and sanitary pits. It doesn't look so beautiful anymore, does it?" he asks sadly.

And this problem has not been solved yet. The draft federal targeted program for the reconstruction and preservation of military graves wandered between the three ministries for several years, but was never adopted.

money for coffins

Most of the work to search for the remains of soldiers is carried out by volunteers at their own expense.

On the eve of the solemn burial of the remains, the guard of honor rehearses the formation.

Their ironed uniforms, polished boots and buttons contrast sharply with the dirty berets and frayed jackets of the searchers.

They stand nearby.

Men dig a mass grave. Women carefully lay out the remains in the coffins.

The administration has little money for coffins, so they are asked to pack them more tightly. On the day of the burial, they will also give a bus, an excavator and a wreath.

On the way home, Prokofiev, who has been looking for missing soldiers for more than 25 years, wearily lights a cigarette and turns to me: “But when these boys went to the front, they were told, fight bravely and the Motherland will not forget you. And where is this Motherland? Who is it? Is it just a handful of searchers?"

In April of this year, the head of the Forensic Expert Center (ECC) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Republic of Kazakhstan, Sergey Solodyankin, again went to the vicinity of the Novgorod region - to the annual Memory Watch. I went not on duty - at the call of my heart, as he has been traveling every year for many years in a row. Search engines raise the remains of soldiers who died in this terrible place to the surface, return their names, and bury them.

This work has been carried out since 1946, but it will still be enough for many, many years: in the Myasny Bor area, according to official data, more than 150 thousand soldiers of the Second Shock Army died in the winter of 1941, in the spring and summer of 1942 alone. Although there is reason to believe that in fact there were many more dead ...

Meat Bor. death valley

Myasnoy Bor is a strange name, creepy. At first, they say, this village was called Meat Boy, because there was a slaughterhouse here. Then the name changed a little, becoming literally prophetic: the surroundings of this place were littered with the bodies of the fallen in the Great Patriotic War for many kilometers.

Until now, you can sometimes hear: Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov surrendered the army, all of it went into the service of the Germans, betraying the Motherland. In general, this is a myth. Especially and there was no one to betray the Motherland in the Second Shock - almost all of its fighters perished in the vicinity of Myasny Bor, in the so-called Valley of Death. Well, those who were taken prisoner ended up with the Germans not at all of their own free will.

... At the end of 1941, during an operation to break the blockade of Leningrad, the Red Army managed to break through the German defenses near Myasny Bor. The fighters of the Second Shock Army moved into the gap that had formed, they advanced towards the strategically important settlement - Lyuban.

In the area of ​​Myasny Bor, a corridor formed, behind which fierce battles unfolded. During the operation - from December 1941 to June 1942, its width varied from 3-4 kilometers to a narrow space of 300 meters. On this "patch" both the soldiers of the Second Shock and the locals who were surrounded fought and died. In June 1942, the survivors tried to break through the ring of German troops. During the breakthrough, most of the soldiers died, many were captured. Some managed to reach the Soviet troops.

This is where hell started.

What happened in the "Volkhov cauldron" was captured in the photographs by the German war correspondent Georg Gundlach. These photos can be found on the Internet. On one of them, German soldiers are next to a signpost in the area of ​​Myasny Bor. It has an inscription in German. Literally, "hell begins here". The Germans were photographed on the eve of hell, and he himself, all nine of his circles, were where the Second shock fought desperately.

The survivors of this terrible meat grinder shared their memories with the author of the book “Valley of Death. The feat and tragedy of the 2nd shock army "by Boris Gavrilov:

“Extreme natural conditions were supplemented by the constant artillery and aviation impact of the enemy. The Germans bombed around the clock. 2nd shock again began to starve. Salvation was that there were many horses of the Gusev corps, killed in the winter. The soldiers called this food "goose". A former soldier of the 92nd division, M.D. Panasyuk, recalled: “Horse skins were a blessing, we fried them on a fire and ate them like cookies, but it was unprofitable, they began to cook jellied meat. From this slurry, many began to swell and die of starvation.

Former commissar of the artillery battery from the 327th division, P.V. They, as a rule, left their villages and settled in groups in drier places, and in some places even in swamps. An unsightly picture was created: the children ask us for bread, but we don’t have it and there’s nothing at all to treat them with.”

Former nurse of the 59th brigade E.L. Balakina (Nazarova): “The hunger was unbearable, they ate all the horses and sour grass. No bread, no crackers. Sometimes U-2s broke through, dropped crackers in paper bags and mail, as well as leaflets that gave us hope for salvation.

Former senior lieutenant P.P. Dmitriev from the 894th artillery regiment of the division: “Hunger constantly tormented me. From May 30 to June 22, I, as a commander, received an official ration - 5 grams of pea concentrate and 13 grams of crackers ... The Red Army soldiers were supposed to have even less ... To the credit of the division officers, they gave all the products they received to a common cauldron and, along with the soldiers, endured the pangs of hunger ".

Writer V.D. Pekelis, a participant in the breakthrough: “The losses in those battles were huge ...

There is no place to bury the dead - all around is deeply frozen ground, trees, waist-deep snow. All clearings, clearings, plots were littered with corpses, they walked along them, sat on them, lay down. When it was required to mark a path in the forest or passages in the snow, instead of milestones, the bodies of the dead were stuck ... "

At the Memory Watch.

Sergei Solodyankin heard a terrible story about the events in Myasnoy Bor in 1989, when he first came to the Novgorod region for the All-Union Memory Watch. Got there by accident. A friend, the coach of the Youth Sports School from Vizinga Alexander Morozov, gathered a detachment, invited him with him. 26-year-old Sergei, then the second secretary of the district committee of the Komsomol of the Priluzsky district, went.

Of course, he had no experience of searching for the remains. More experienced comrades helped - in the Novgorod region, a search movement was already developed at that time. Volunteer Nikolai Orlov became its founding father, who began search work back in 1946, organized several search teams in the region, and achieved the involvement of the military in the search. He continued his work until his death in 1980.

As Sergei Solodyankin says, both then and now the search engine has three main “weapons”: a probe, a metal detector and a shovel. The search technique was learned on the spot - it turned out to be easy.

At that time, “special signs” also remained on the ground: if a rusted barrel of a rifle or a helmet can be seen from the ground, it means that somewhere nearby it is necessary to look for the dead. In the vicinity of Myasny Bor, there were still rusted skeletons of cars, and indeed there were a lot of all kinds of "iron".

S. Solodyankin for the rest of his life remembered the name of the first fighter, whom he "raised" from the ground - Ovechkin. Then he was lucky: he had a soldier's medallion with him, and there all the data - last name, first name, patronymic, rank.

The search engine from Komi encountered the remains of the soldiers for the first time, but did not experience either disgust or fear - only sadness: there was a man, a boy at all, still to live and live, but here, in the swamp, he disappeared without a trace. And only then did the newcomer to the search business understand what it meant to bring back the memory of the missing person. It’s like fulfilling your duty to him: not just an obscure “unit” of the Red Army rotted in a swamp, but a Man with his own destiny, aspirations and hopes, with his life taken away so early, cruelly and senselessly.

Sergey Solodyankin began to go to the Memory Watch every spring. In 1991, he entered the police service, and the very next year he took three difficult teenagers to the Novgorod region. The boys skipped classes at school, swore obscenities, smoked on trifles, windows at school could be broken. The boys did not shy away from work, but they were somehow indifferent to everything - some bones, some pieces of iron ... The turning point came at the end of the shift, when the search engines, who had come to Myasnaya Bor from all over the country (two thousand, there were), lined up at the mass grave, where the remains of the soldiers were buried. The mother of one of the children who died in 42 was also there. She spoke, remembered her son, shed a tear, began to thank the search engines. And suddenly, she knelt in front of them. And all two thousand people in a single impulse fell to their knees in front of her.

- I look at the boys, - says Sergey Solodyankin, - and their tears are rolling. Since then, the boys have been replaced - not a single drive to the police. They grew up to be worthy people.

Pulls, and that's it!

And then those same “dashing 90s” began, and Sergey Solodyankin’s Memory Watch was interrupted - somehow it didn’t work out to go. But at the beginning of the new century, search engines from the Syktyvkar detachment "Link of Times" turned to him, already heading the ECC of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Republic of Kazakhstan. They found a soldier's medallion at the battlefields and asked to read the data. It is clear that over the years since the war, not only the paper has decayed - the inscriptions on the iron medallions have been erased. But experts have both methods and special preparations that help restore these inscriptions.

The expert helped the search engines, at the same time he remembered his Memory Watches. And next spring he went with the detachment to Staraya Russa, Novgorod region - at his own expense, of course. I took a special vacation for this. But the main place of his Memory Watch is still Myasnoy Bor. Now he goes there every year, but he cannot explain why: he pulls, and that's it!

In the new century, the picture in the Valley of Death has changed dramatically. There was almost no “iron” left - in the post-perestroika hard times, people smashed everything to scrap metal collection points. Black diggers at the battlefields also worked: they raked everything clean. Only the bones were left, they do not need them - they do not bring profit.

On the one hand, it became more difficult to work, because the more time passes, the better nature hides the traces of battles - the places where soldiers died are overgrown with grass, trees, burials sink deeper into the swamp. On the other hand, it has become easier: now Sergey Solodyankin has the experience of a forensic expert. By the nature of his service, he was used to small details, “evidence”, to notice. Somewhere the earth sank, somewhere a barely noticeable mound, and there the tree was somehow strangely curved ...

Living past.

Sergey Solodyankin can talk about the dead soldiers of the Second Shock for hours. He remembers everyone by name, who he raised from the earth, knows who died how. Once we stumbled upon a clearing and found the remains of a Red Army soldier on it. They dug nearby - another one. Then another and another... Only fifteen people, all with weapons. But only one has a rifle. The rest - some with a bayonet, some with a knife, some with a sapper shovel. And it is clear that they went on the attack. All one after another was mowed down by a German machine gunner.

Even the soldiers of the German army recall that the most terrible thing in the Valley of Death - worse than winter frosts and air bombings - were precisely these insane Russian attacks. Exhausted, starving soldiers, almost empty-handed, went on the attack on machine guns and tanks, ready to kill and die ...

Another time, the search engines dug up a dugout, and in it were the remains of twenty people. It can be seen that the shell hit the dugout, and everyone was immediately covered. The remains were literally collected by the bone. Somehow they raised the bones, it is clear that part of the human chest. But in the same pile, there were other bones - although not human, but very familiar. I didn’t even remember right away - chicken! The identity of the deceased person was established, and the military specialty - a cook ... Where did he get this bird from in that terrible hunger? What was going to cook from it? What did you think about at the last moment of your life? Maybe, falling to the floor, he covered his greatest value with his chest - a skinny chicken, which was supposed to be a dinner for twenty people ...

And in the spring of 2011, the remains of a woman were raised from the ground, they found out: a nurse Tamara Bystrova. They found her niece, and she hardly even heard about the missing aunt. But the news of the deceased relative prompted her to study the history of the family, and she learned everything about Tamara. It turned out that she met her soul mate in the war.

She is a nurse, he is a military doctor. They served together and fell in love with each other. They were waiting for the Victory in order to get married and have children. In the Valley of Death, they also ended up together, together they dreamed of escaping from the encirclement.

The remains of Tamara's beloved were raised back in 1991 - they found him at approximately the same place as the remains of the nurse. It looks like they died together. Only then it was "overlooked". But twenty years later, the lovers reunited again - in the same mass grave.

How did these two die? Now one can only guess about it. But in the book of Boris Gavrilov there is a very similar episode:
"... commander of the 2nd battalion
Lieutenant Pred of the 1265th regiment of the 382nd rifle division left the encirclement together with the military assistant girl Spirina on the night of June 25th. From the explosion of a mine, she lost her leg, his arm and leg were torn off. The young man and the girl simultaneously took out a revolver and a pistol. Two more shots were added to the roar of the battle.

The land of Myasnoy Bor keeps many such terrible stories.

The remains of the fighters - both identified and unnamed - are buried in mass graves. If relatives can be found, they are invited to the funeral. Is it just that all this is necessary for people who sometimes have never even seen their missing relative? Sergey Solodyankin admits: a few years ago it seemed that it was not necessary. But in recent years, something has changed - not only the older generation, but also young people come to the funeral. Although, of course, there are more elderly people, and they experience their loss more acutely.

I remember one case: they found the remains of a fighter, established his identity, it turned out that he was a Ukrainian. A nephew was found in Donetsk - he himself is already about seventy years old. But he came to his uncle's funeral, called relatives from all over the former Soviet Union - some from Ukraine, some from Russia, some from Moldova. At their native grave, they mourned together the tragedy of that war - Patriotic for all of them.

Mysticism and more...

They say that Myasnoy Bor has become a zone of chrono-mirages. Like, the concentration of human suffering in this place was so dense that it changed the very structure of space and time. So one hears in the Novgorod forests either German wartime music, or the roar of tanks, or the screams of attackers and the groans of dying people. Villagers say that the ghosts of dead soldiers knock on their houses, asking for food. In the swamps at night they notice translucent figures that float inaudibly over the bog.

Also, the birds don't sing here. Yes, and they are not in the Valley of Death, as if they are specially flying around a dead place.

Sergey Solodyankin is skeptical about mystical stories. I haven't seen a single ghost in all my years. But the search engine admits: there is something strange in these places.

Once we stumbled upon a clearing where our hospital was during the war. Having captured the clearing, the Germans finished off the wounded soldiers and threw the corpses into the funnel. In the same funnel, a pillow happened to be, apparently, one of the wounded was thrown along with the bed. When the search engines unearthed the funnel, they could not believe their eyes. The bodies of the soldiers decayed, but from the pillow, when she was lifted, blood flowed. As if not seventy years had passed since that terrible massacre, but seven hours. Even with his current experience as an expert, S. Solodyankin cannot explain how this is possible.

Another time, the search engines found the remains of an officer in the swamp, and pulled out his boots. And in them - pieces of cardboard, which the fighters put instead of insoles. Naturally decayed, wet - to be honest, it's just pieces of dirt. But Sergei Solodyankin put them in a bag, decided to investigate in Syktyvkar, in case he could find out something. In boots, the officer could hide the documents so as not to lose them.

I forgot about the package at home, after a while I found this slimy lump, brought it to work, studied it, but achieved nothing - dirt, and nothing more! He threw the lump into the wastebasket and went about his business. And after a while I heard a whisper: I am here, I am here...» The sound was coming… from the wastebasket.

When the shock passed, the search engine took out a cardboard box from the urn, reviewed it, again found nothing, and again threw it into the basket. He left the office for a few minutes to distract himself - maybe he was imagining it from fatigue. He just returned and sat down, and from the basket he was already more insistent: “ I'm here, look!»

S. Solodyankin admits: he is not a superstitious person, but at that time - his hair stood on end. He dismantled the cardboard in layers, almost laying it out “by molecules”. And I found the miraculously preserved pieces of the receipt. And from them came the name - Aristarkh Kuziminsky. So one more victim returned from oblivion - an officer of the Second Shock.

"News" from the dead.

And other dead soldiers find even stranger ways to “give news of themselves” to their relatives. Sergey Solodyankin is friends with Alexander Orlov, the son of the same Nikolai Orlov, who began the search work in Myasny Bor. Somehow they got into a conversation, and Alexander complained: they say, so many documents have been collected, but no one sees them. As they lay in the ground, so now they lie in the archive. We thought about it and decided to publish a series of books. Alexander undertook to prepare the text, Sergey was responsible for photographs and copies of documents.

The books were published at their own expense. The series was called simply - "Documents of War", a total of five books were released. The circulation, of course, was small, but one copy of each was sent to Myasnoy Bor - to the hall of military glory. Well, one day sightseers from Moscow arrived there. They go and look at exhibits. One elderly visitor took a book published in Komi, leafed through it, cried out and fainted. When the ambulance medics brought her to her senses, the excursionist grabbed the book again: here, she says, the father’s signature is on the document.

She said that her father went missing in 1942. Mother all her life tried to find out at least something about his fate, then her daughter looked for data. And suddenly I saw my father's autograph. It was made in 1942, maybe just before his death.

Of course, they gave the book to the daughter of a fighter. Upon learning of this story, Sergei Solodyankin sent her the original document with his father's signature. So the soldier of the Second shock I was able to say goodbye to my family.

... The great Russian commander Alexander Suvorov once said: “ The war is not over until the last soldier is buried.". Today Sergey Solodyankin and his search engine friends are back in the Valley of Death. And maybe, through their efforts, the day when the last unknown soldier of the Great Patriotic War will return his name and find his last refuge has become even a little closer.