The 65th Anniversary of the Great Victory: The War-time archives to appear on the Internet

In 2010 the collection of unique documents of the Great Patriotic War representing 150 thousand pages will become accessible via the Internet. Among these documentary materials will be the documents previously aimed only to the senior government authorities.

“The idea to provide a free access to the war-time documents, which are now kept in the archives in the printed version appeared after the experience of materials’ digitization for the Presidential Library”, - reported the Minister of telecommunications Igor Shchogolev.

“In commemoration of the 65^th anniversary of the Victory the Russian Internet will launch the Great Patriotic War digital encyclopedia, which will contain the names of the commanders as well as of front-line soldiers, information about great battles and the names of the military equipments”, — added Igor Shchogolev.

The Ministry of telecommunications, the Microsoft Company, The State Archive of the Russian Federation and the information agency ITAR-TASS will participate in the work of the project and provide the war-time archival documents for digitization. The Internet users will get a free access to the on-line archival collection.

The Minister of telecommunications explained that this large collection of documents freely accessible via the Internet would be a “great protection force to avoid the attempts of history falsification”.