TsAMO is the main archive, but not the first one to ask
The Russian Defence Ministry Central Archive (TsAMO) in Podolsk, just outside Moscow, holds the core records on Soviet WWII service: prisoner-of-war cards, war diaries, citations for awards, medical battalion paperwork. If you are going to find anything, most of it is here.
You can request material from TsAMO by post or through the departmental website. Reply times run from three to eight months. A standard certificate costs around 1,500 ₽. The catch: to get a useful answer you need to know the unit number, conscription date and place of service. Without that, the archive cannot find your relative among millions of records.
So you start with OBD Memorial and Memory of the People
These two open Russian Defence Ministry sites have digitised a large portion of WWII paperwork and made it free to search. With a clean name you can find within five minutes:
- a service card showing the units the person passed through
- records of wounds, hospitalisation, and death
- award citations with descriptions of the action
- burial location, where it was recorded
- documents about capture and escape from POW camps
A small trick: write the name in several variants. Old spelling, alternative transliteration, different patronymics. Wartime documents are full of typos and pre-reform spelling. Shift the year of birth by ±2 years. Add the region. Search experts know that small variations are often what unlocks a hit.
Trophy archives for the missing-in-action
If your relative is listed as missing in action, there is a real chance they were taken prisoner. Records about prisoners are in the German POW-camp cards that were taken to the USSR after the war. They are kept in TsAMO (fond 58, opis 977520) and partially digitised on OBD Memorial.
A card contains the name, date and place of birth, home address, date and place of capture, the camp, and sometimes a fingerprint and a photograph. These cards recover the fate of roughly 30% of the missing.
Declassified files
For officers, intelligence and penal battalion service, the surviving documents are often in declassified fonds. Access goes through a request to the FSB Central Archive or through a lawyer. Expect six to twelve months.
If your relative was repressed before or after the war, that is a separate category of documents. We have a dedicated article on FSB archives.
When all you have is a name
This is the hardest situation, but not hopeless. The strategy is reconstruction by unit number. If family stories mention a specific battle, you can work out which units fought there and then go through the war diaries of those units.
Another route is the burial site. If you know the mass grave, you can pull the list of buried for that location and look for matches by date of death and initials. It is slow, but it works.
«Most of our military clients arrive with a pre-war photo and a name, nothing else. Four to eight months later we have the service path down to the week, the citations, and the burial location. It is not magic. It is a system.»
— From the centre's military-research practice
