Letter from the past

In Gomel, experts restored the text of a Red Army soldier’s letter and also the men’s personal data 

The remains of a Red Army soldier who died in August 1941 were unearthed in the Zhlobin District in June. The excavations were conducted by the Rogachev-Zhlobin Zvezda military search group jointly with a specialised separate 52nd battalion of Belarus’ Defence Ministry.

As Aleksandr Pishchalo, from the Zhlobin Inter-District Department of the State Committee of Forensic Examinations, has informed, a soldier's medallion and a notebook were also discovered. An initial inspection of the medallion failed to identify the man: the leaflet was badly decayed and the information on it was destroyed.

In turn, notes and a handwritten text have preserved in the notebook. To spell them out, the finds were sent to forensic experts of the State Committee of Forensic Examinations’ Department in the Gomel Region.

“Specialists have found out that one of the fragments is Mikhail Loginov’s letter to his cousin, while another features a handwritten text with the data of the medallion leaflet – which reads: ‘Loginov Mikhail Petrovich, born in 1907. A native of the Saratov Region, Petrovsk District, Tovalozhka Village Council, the village of Tovalozhka. The address of the last place of residence: the city of Saratov, the Kirov Plant, new ITK, barrack No. 1, room No. 16’,” Ruslan Gabrilev, an official representative of the State Committee of Forensic Examinations’ Department in the Gomel Region, says.

The information obtained has enabled specialists to find the soldier’s relatives who took part in the ceremony of his remains’ reburial in the Zhlobin District.