WW2 Soviet campaign documents

[Marcel Banziger]

I've been collecting Soviet medals for quite some time now but only since the beginning of this year I got highly interested in the Soviet campaign documents handed out to soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. When knowing where to search for information there is so much more to get out of these documents than just the name and medal the soldier earned.

Here's a few examples of the defence medal documents:

For the defence of Leningrad, second model award document with signatures of the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council of People's Deputies Popkov and the Secretary of the Board Bubnov.



For the defence of Stalingrad, first model document awarded to Vera Naumovna Kovalets.



For the defence of Moscow, second model document (with stiffer cardboard) awarded to Nikolay Shach(?), part of the 157th Infantry Division.




Here's some examples of the Victory medal documents:

Capture of Berlin, a few different ones. The second one is the 8th Guards Cavalry. The third one is also a Guards unit but I need to do more research.







A bit of a different one, a Certificate of Gratitude for capturing Berlin:



Furthermore some Victory over Germany documents. The first one is awarded to enlisted man Evgeniy Dmitrijevitch Tishenko, born in 1926 and joined the Red Army in 1943 in Kharkov as part of the 853 Artillery Regiment 263 Rifle Division.
Awarded Medal for Bravery on March 29 1945 and got the Order of the Great Patriotic War 2nd class on April 6 1985.




The next one is awarded to an artillerist of the 82nd Army, more research is needed however. The document is signed by a Guards General-Major.




The next document is awarded to technical Lieutnant Aleksei Nikitovich Panin of the 621st Aviation Attack Regiment (Assault Aviation Regiment). The document is signed by Colonel Sukhikh.




Since Russian is a difficult language and research is rather time consuming it will take some time before I have all of these completely researched. But that is part of the fun of collecting and bringing back alive history.

Feel free to share your documents here! In my opinion collecting these documents is still a small and underrated part of WW2 collecting and I would be interested to see more of these documents. We can learn from these and perhaps even complete research on individuals with the help from more documents related to the same regiments, divisions etc.

Thanks for watching
Marcel

[Eric Gaumann]

Excellent post Marcel! Thanks for sharing. Indeed, once I started accumulating medals adding the corresponding documents seemed like the think to do.
And of the gratitude certificates there exist a multitude of variations to collect.

[Marcel Banziger]

Thanks a lot Eric.
There's indeed a bit over 350 different Gratitude certificates if I am correct with multiple variations in design.

Hereby my latest acquisition, another Stalingrad document.

[KLMKsunbunny]

Here are a few Berlin related ones....

Issued to Red army Lieutenant Borokhovski Leonid Naumovich :




Red Army soldier Belyaev Ivan Fortsanovich, for taking Berlin:


Red Army soldier Belyaev Ivan Fortsanovich, for breaking the German defences on the Oder River and approach to Berlin:


Another for Berlin, issued to Guk Joseph Nikitovich:

[Marcel Banziger]

Thanks for sharing these certificates here. Those are really nice ones, especially the one on red paper is less common

[Eric Gaumann]

Participant gratitudes.

I got a group of nine all awarded to one man; Red Army Man Chinskiy.
I'm guessing right now he was with the 2nd Ukrainian Front.
1) for: THE PARTICIPANT OF FIGHTS FOR DNESTR
2) To the PARTICIPANT of FIGHTS FOR Galatz Romania\
3) To the PARTICIPANT of FIGHTS FOR Brailov, Romania
4) For excellent operations on breaking of strongly strengthened defence of the opponent Southwest (of?) Budapest and for mastering by the cities of Szekesfehervar and guards
5) TO THE PARTICIPANT OF GREAT BUADPESHTSKY FIGHT
6) For the battle on the Дунаем (Дунай) (Danube)
7) TO THE PARTICIPANT OF FIGHT BEYOND DANUBE
8) To the PARTICIPANT of FIGHTS FOR the City of Sopron Hungary
9) TO THE PARTICIPANT OF FIGHTS IN AUSTRIA.

Here is an image of the first. The rest are all in the same size and style.

[KLMKsunbunny]

Thanks a lot Eric.
There's indeed a bit over 350 different Gratitude certificates if I am correct with multiple variations in design.

According to "The Soviet Soldier" by philippe Rio, there were 373 numbered, and four unnumbered. They started printing them after the battle of Stalingrad.


Thanks for the compliments Marcel, I read also that the certificates were sometimes printed on "liberated" paper in the areas that had been captured, so I wonder if that accounts for the different paper / simpler design of the red one? I have a few others I have not yet scanned..

Sounds like a great group Eric..! I like that you can chart where the soldier was throughout the War. I was once offered one with 11 certificates that culminated with a lovely Berlin doc, but sadly I did not have the funds at the time.

[Marcel Banziger]

Very nice grouping indeed Eric. With these documents you can follow a soldiers' footsteps throughout his war years. Makes the research all the more interesting

Thanks KLMKsunbunny: with 373 numbered and 4 unnumbered I still have some time to go before my collection is complete haha

Here's the numbers 304 (Liberation of Altdam) and 342 (Encirclement of Berlin and capture of several cities like Nauen and Rohrbeck), both awarded to sergeant Ivan Tarasenko.

[Marcel Banziger]

And my latest addition, the defence of Caucasus document awarded to Red navy soldier Vasiliy Shiryaev from the Black Sea Fleet.

[Marcel Banziger]

A few more documents found their way into my collection. The first one a Guards document for the Liberation of Prague. I have not done any research on this one yet.




And three documents to the same soldier Michael ..., the documents for the Capture of Budapest, the Capture of Vienna and the Victory over Japan. For these I also haven't done any research yet.

[Eric Gaumann]

And three documents to the same soldier Michael ..., the documents for the Capture of Budapest, the Capture of Vienna and the Victory over Japan. For these I also haven't done any research yet.

Interesting with the Japan medal doc grouped with Vienna and Budapest; the common groupings with both the Japan medal and western campaign medals usually involve Warsaw and Berlin.

[Marcel Banziger]

Interesting with the Japan medal doc grouped with Vienna and Budapest; the common groupings with both the Japan medal and western campaign medals usually involve Warsaw and Berlin.

There is one more document, the victory over Germany doc from the same guy which will come soon as well.
But I never knew, nor did I really pay attention to the combination of docs but that is something to keep an eye on. Interesting fact actually!

[Ralph P]

This is a great thread to go through and see the document collection.

[Marcel Banziger]

Thanks Ralph. These are interesting to collect and quite affordable as well.

[GREIF]

There is one more document, the victory over Germany doc from the same guy which will come soon as well.
But I never knew, nor did I really pay attention to the combination of docs but that is something to keep an eye on. Interesting fact actually!

I would say that this is typical of the 3 Ukrainian Front