50 Years on, Russia Buries MIAs

Nearly half a century after the end of World War II, the remains of thousands of Russian soldiers still lie on the battlefields where they fell, according to a team of specialists dedicated to finding and identifying the victims.As a result of intense efforts by the Union of Russian Search Brigades, more than 2,000 have been identified and will be honored in a special service of remembrance Wednesday, the 53rd anniversary of the start of the Great Patriotic War.Some 3,000 Russian soldiers are still officially registered as missing, said Oleg Gaba, chairman of the union, but he believes the real number is many times that. He said that over the past three years, the union's activists had unearthed the remains of 54,000 soldiers and managed to identify about 3,000 of them.The union was formed in 1987 to organize the 300 search brigades in Russia and more in other Soviet republics. Each brigade consists of 10 to 50 mostly young volunteers who search the old battle grounds for the unmarked burial sites, mass graves and the remains of abandoned casualties. The top goal is to identify the dead, or at least bury the remains, "so bulldozers do not plow through our grandfathers' bones," said Gaba, whose grandfather went missing during the war.Alexander Tsarkov, an active search volunteer for the past six years, said the reason why young people spend their vacations digging up skulls and bones is that "we are returning to our people what was due 50 years ago."The union receives more than 200 letters daily asking to locate missing relatives or providing information, Gaba said. Among recent donations was the charred diary of a young Russian pilot killed in Germany in April 1945, two weeks before the German capitulation. Days before his death, Yury Davydov, then 22, used carbon pencil to write his entries: "Today...Volodya Korytin, the squadron number two, did not return. Almost all (aircraft) are damaged now," he wrote on March 30 . Two days later: "There was a jazz night. Grounded by bad weather." The last entry on April 22 reads: "Flew my first sortie at 1700. Baptism of fire." His body and the documents were found by ground troops in a crashed airplane.The searchers' work includes archive research in the wintertime and site examination. In spring, the brigade members pack their camping gear, shovels and maps and head to the digging sites. The bones are usually buried in the nearest town.The identification success depends on whether special ID tags -- ebonite, metal or wooden capsules containing a strip of paper with the bearer's data -- can be found, Gaba said. But few bodies are accompanied by such documents while some are unreadable.Many skulls have neat bullet holes on the back, indicating that the soldiers had been shot in cold blood, probably by their officers, having been badly wounded, Tsarkov said.The names of the identified soldiers will appear in a special Memorial Book to come out next year for the commemoration of the 50th victory anniversary, Gaba said.