Databases on the history of local population migrations in Russia at the end of the XIX – XX centuries: Information capabilities and processing methods (Part II, databases of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation)

The article presents methodological experience of working with sources of military departments, which provide a lot of information about the migration movements of specific people. The Ministry of Defense has created great opportunities for historians by compiling and sharing electronic managed databases on tens of millions of dead and decorated Soviet citizens. On the basis of these materials of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (CAMO), arranged according to dozens of parameters of related personal information, as well as according to regional, district and city military enlistment offices, regional authorities prepared and published in printed and electronic form relevant Books in memory of fellow countrymen who died on the fronts of World War II and returned home alive.   Comparing the place of birth and the year of birth of the person involved in the mentioned databases with the place and time of his conscription into the Red Army with a high representativeness of personalities gives a very accurate idea of the volume and direction of emigration from their native places. Electronic databases and other mass sources originating from the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation are the most important and mandatory basis for studying Russian migrations on long continuous lines of complex sociographic information. Their principal methodological advantage is the possibility of creating holistic pictures of formative social processes and phenomena at the levels from individual human destinies to aggregations of country scales.

database, migration, historical demographics, social mobility, The Great Patriotic War, Tambov Region, Memory Book, heroes of the USSR, military personnel, prisoners of war