Support The Moscow Times!

All Russian World War I Documents Available Online

More than 300,000 documents from Russian military archives on World War I have been made available online, a senior archivist said Monday.

The archival military records have been digitized and entered into a database on the website of the Military Historical Archive, said Andrei Artizov, head of the Federal Archive Agency.

"Not a single record is being kept secret," Artizov said, Interfax reported. "Access it from Paris, Vilnius, Warsaw — wherever you want."

A second project involving the digitization of more than 15 million records is also under way, Artizov said while attending events in Paris marking the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union's accession to UNESCO.

He said the project is "of great humanitarian value."

Russia's Imperial Army lost about 2 million men during World War I, many of whom were Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Belarussian, or Jewish, Artizov said.

Britain and Canada have also started to digitize hundreds of thousands of documents in time for this year's centennial anniversary of World War I.


Read more