The Russian Federation Ministry of Defense announced today (7 May) that it has created a new web portal commemorating the liberation of Poland, using a number of documents from the Ministry’s voluminous Central Archive. The site, entitled “Освобождение Польши: Помнит, нельзя забыть!” [The Liberation of Poland: Remember, Never Forget!], provides a multimedia walkthrough of a number of cities in Poland most heavily impacted by the Red Army’s liberation. The walkthrough includes looks at memorials through photos, maps, and reference sheets (in some cases, before and after photos for those memorials that had since been taken down after the fall of the Soviet Union), documents from a number of combat logs from various military units engaged in the fighting, and documents listing the names of those Soviet troops killed during the fighting. Additionally, you can find a number of orders and instructions from higher headquarters, up to the General Staff as Red Army forces pushed their way through in their advance on Berlin.
There are hundreds of documents within the website. We hope to add a number of them to our files of translated records as we explore these new sites as they continue to emerge.
Another excellent site, published a few years back, is the English-language “The Liberation of Poland: The Price of Victory,” created by the primary Russian history website. It, too, offers a number of declassified documents, already translated and annotated.
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Translating History 