"Medallion of Death" Russian search movement - names from soldiers' medallions Medallions of Soviet soldiers during the war years

The soldier's mortal medallion in the Red Army was introduced on 08/14/1925 and actually copied the "ladanka" of the army of tsarist Russia. The medallion was issued to all enlisted in the military, regardless of the type of troops. The first samples of medallions were made in the form of a flat tin box ("almond"), 50x33x4 mm in size with an eyelet for a cord when worn around the neck. A standard form was inserted inside the box, and in its absence, any piece of paper with the owner's data. On the form of the insert there were the following columns: last name, first name, patronymic, year of birth, military rank; native: republic, region, region, city, district, village council, village; family address; surname name and patronymic of a relative; by which district military commissariat he was called; blood type. It was forbidden to indicate the name of the military unit in the medallion. During the fighting, it became obvious that the tin medallion was not airtight, and the parchment insert quickly became unusable.

In connection with this order of the NPO dated March 15, 1941, No. 138, new medallions were put into circulation in the form of a textolite or ebonite six / octahedral or round cylindrical pencil case, inside of which a piece of paper with the soldier’s data was inserted. The length of a standard case with a screw cap was 50 mm, width 14 mm, and inner diameter 8 mm. The pencil case could have an eyelet on the lid for the cord. Either a special form or an ordinary handwritten note was used. The form was filled in two copies. In the event of the death of a soldier, one copy was sent to the office of the unit, the second remained with the body of the deceased. In wartime, other forms of capsules were also made. In besieged Leningrad, they were produced round, made of porous plastic, which absorbed moisture, and therefore the blank was poorly preserved in such a capsule. Metal capsules of round and rectangular shape were also made.

There are self-made posthumous medallions, for which they used shells from a cartridge for a Mosin rifle. After pulling out the bullet, the serviceman poured out the gunpowder, put a note in the cartridge case, and then plugged the hole with an inverted bullet. Wooden pencil cases are also known, which were made both by handicraft artels and by the military personnel themselves. Such capsules were varnished, and this briefly extended their durability.

As practice has shown, the medallions used in the Red Army turned out to be very impractical: water-permeable, not heat-resistant. Handwritten notes were not always legible. In addition, many servicemen did not put a note in the “death medallion” at all, considering it a bad omen. The frequently changing system of registration of personnel of the Red Army, which even during the war, either introduced identification marks or canceled them, also negatively affected the duty of military personnel to wear an identification mark. Officially, on the basis of regulatory documents, "mortal medallions" were issued only from the middle of 1941 to the end of 1942. During the rest of the war, identification marks were worn by servicemen on their own initiative. As a result, unidentified irretrievable losses of servicemen during the war amounted to more than 40%. However, the main reason for such a disregard for the accounting of personnel and irretrievable losses in the Red Army was the system of insignificance of human life that had been established since the days of serfdom. The postulate - women still give birth - is still valid today in the post-Soviet territories.

Every day more and more South Ural residents learn about their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who died and went missing during the Great Patriotic War.

Anton Sharpilov, chairman of the regional branch of the Search Movement of Russia in the Chelyabinsk region, told the correspondent of AiF-Chelyabinsk about how the search teams find the remains of the dead defenders of the Fatherland and perpetuate their memory.

30 years of searching

Daria Dubrovskikh, AiF-Chelyabinsk: Anton, how old is your movement in the Chelyabinsk region and who are its participants?

Anton Sharpilov: At first, in the eighties, initiative groups were created, which, at their own peril and risk, went to the battlefields and buried the soldiers of the Red Army. These groups were created by people who were not indifferent to the fate of those who gave their lives for our Motherland. Among them are Alexandra Popova, Valentina Pogodina, Galina Neretina, Ivan Abrakhin.

And only in 1989 did the official expedition of the military-historical society "Bulat" appear. In 1999, with the support of Governor Pyotr Sumin, the Bulat State Military Center was established, which was engaged in search work until 2012 and was the first in the Russian Federation to conduct search work in the Chechen Republic. Now the regional branch of the all-Russian search movement includes 30 detachments, 460 participants from all over the region.

- How is the place for the expedition determined?

Each detachment is working on military formations that were formed in the Southern Urals and sent to the front. For example, the Trinity search detachment "Strela" is working on the 80th cavalry division. She was recruited from the Cossacks who lived in Troitsk. The search engines are studying the combat path of this brigade: where they started to fight, where the main battles took place, where they suffered heavy losses. This is mainly the Leningrad region. The search detachment of Magnitogorsk "Phoenix" is looking for the dead South Urals in the Rzhev region.

Searchers should not be confused with trophy hunters. Photo:

- The main purpose of the search party in the expedition?

Find and rebury the missing soldiers. Try to identify them.

- Is it even possible?

It is possible, but extremely difficult. With careful searching and luck. Ideally, when there is a mortal medallion or a book of a Red Army soldier or some personal items with initials on them. Or some kind of award with a number.

We need any clue that can lead to the personal data of a fighter. Medallions are very rare, because among the soldiers there was a superstition - wearing a mortal medallion is not good.

- What unusual finds come across?

For example, members of the Svarog search squad found Swiss watches with initials engraved on them. But, unfortunately, they could not be identified. This year, the search engines of the Rusichi detachment found the sign of a sniper. But, basically, mugs, bottles, bowlers, cartridge cases, fragments of mines and sapper shovels come across. Some believe that we are looking for some trophies, rare things. This is wrong.

- So-called "black diggers" are engaged in it. Are you confused with them?

Yes, black diggers are just looking for trophies, or they are looking for weapons and ammunition in order to bring what they found into a combat state and sell it profitably. We have nothing to do with this. And then it contradicts the moral code of the search engine adopted in the movement. We are not black diggers.

The main thing is to find at least some clue that will help identify the soldier. Photo: Regional branch of OOD "Search movement of Russia" in the Chelyabinsk region

Perpetuate the feat

- Since what year have you been in the search movement? Tell us about your most memorable expedition.

I have been working in this field since 2011. And the most memorable expedition for me was a year later on the Sinyavino Heights. There, during the Patriotic War, fierce battles were fought for Leningrad. We followed in the footsteps of the 63rd Separate Naval Brigade. They found the remains of a soldier and a medallion (a twisting ebonite pencil case into which a piece of paper with the soldier's data was inserted. - Auth.) in good condition and surprisingly with all the data filled in. It turned out to be a native of the Kursk region.

They found relatives, took their remains for burial in the city of Sudzha, Kursk Region. At the ceremony, the 75-year-old son of the deceased soldier approached us and said that we had fulfilled his dream. Throughout his life, he dreamed of finding his father and at the end of his life he wanted to be buried next to him. And literally two months after that, the grandfather's grandchildren called us and said that he had died.

For the sake of such moments, such a difficult task is done. And what do you feel when you are there, at the place where a lot of blood was shed?

Words cannot express this feeling. When you come to the battlefields, when you find these things, when you understand that fierce battles were fought here seventy years ago, as a result of which we now have a calm life, it becomes, to put it mildly, uncomfortable.

There comes a complete understanding and awareness of the depth of the feat that was accomplished. Understanding how hard the victory was achieved. The search engines see with their own eyes that environment, feel the natural and climatic conditions in which our grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought.

Often we start digging trenches, and there water is knee-deep. We understand that we are just digging, and every day they ran through the damp trenches with a rifle and fired. We overcome these conditions every day. It is necessary to go on the offensive, and everywhere there is mud, slush. This puts a lot of psychological pressure on a person ...

For two or three weeks on the expedition, it becomes clear how understanding and worldview are changing, especially among young people. And this once again testifies to the importance of search work for the younger generation.

- How can I leave a request to search for relatives, and how many soldiers are found?

An application can be left in the "Search for relatives" section of the information portal www.chel-poisk.ru.

This year, the Orientir search team succeeded in restoring the fate of those whom they considered missing in 86 families.

So, the youngest son Vyacheslav Sapegin, for his father, a deceased officer, senior lieutenant of the 23rd separate mortar brigade, head of communications of the division of the 529th mortar regiment Pavel Sapegin, born in 1908, was awarded the Order of the Red Star for his courage and good organization of communications in battles in March -April 1945. The second order of the Red Army soldier Nikolai Sinelnikov was donated by the relatives to the fund of the Chelyabinsk Museum of Local Lore.

Now representatives of search associations and detachments of the Chelyabinsk region are actively participating in spring expeditions. At the moment, the remains of thirty Red Army soldiers and three medallions have been raised on the territory of the Kirovsky district of the Leningrad region. One of the medallions was not readable, one was read. It belonged to senior sergeant Dudin Ilya Ivanovich, born in 1916, a native of the village of Dudnevo, Malinsky district, Moscow region.

The search team "Rostok" from the Chelyabinsk region discovered during the expedition in the Krasnoperekopsk region of the Republic of Crimea an unaccounted for burial, which was not marked on the ground.

It was also possible to establish the identity of the warrior by the insert in the soldier's medallion. It turned out that the remains belong to a Red Army soldier of the 387th rifle division, a native of the Kunashaksky district, Siraev Khusnutdin Mingazovich, born in 1924, who died on 04/09/1944. The remains of the warrior were delivered to Chelyabinsk and will soon be reburied with all due honors.

I would like to note that in June this year, on the pedestrian part of Kirovka, near the monument to volunteer tankers, a traveling exhibition “Search, you cannot forget” will be open, where Chelyabinsk residents will be able to apply to search for their loved ones. The Chelyabinsk detachment conducts it.

Names from soldiers' medallions.

Comp.: Konoplev A.Yu., Salakhiev R.R.

Kazan: "Fatherland", 2005.

The book contains personal biographical data on 6410 servicemen who died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, whose names were established by public search organizations in the course of search work on the battlefields. The information was obtained on the basis of soldiers' medallions, personal items found with the remains of dead servicemen, and as a result of archival research.

Names from soldiers' medallions. T. 2 /
Compiled by: Konoplev A.Yu., Salakhiev R.R., Salakhiev M.Yu. - Kazan: "Fatherland", 2007.

The second volume of the book contains biographical data on 2,124 servicemen who died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, whose names were established by search organizations in the course of search work on the battlefields. The information was obtained on the basis of soldiers' medallions, personal items found with the remains of dead servicemen, and as a result of archival research.
The book is addressed to the relatives of the victims, search engines, employees of state authorities and military administration, working groups of regional publications of the Book of Memory, to everyone who is not indifferent to the fate of those who died for the Motherland.

Names from soldiers' medallions. T. 5. Aviation / Prokofiev I.G. - Kazan: "Fatherland", 2011. - 360 p., illustration.

The fifth volume of the book - a special issue "Aviation" - contains essays on the aviators of the Great Patriotic War, whose planes were found in the battles in the Leningrad region. Together with the author, the reader is immersed in the vicissitudes of the search work to establish the names and fates of the crews in the course of archival research on the basis of the unit numbers of found aircraft, documents and awards found in aircraft wreckage.

The book uses Russian and foreign archival materials, the results of search expeditions, photographs.

The book is addressed to relatives of wartime aviators, search engines, researchers of the history of domestic aviation, to everyone who is not indifferent to the fate of those who died for the Motherland.

Names from soldiers' medallions. T. 7/ Comp.: Konoplev A.Yu., Salakhiev R.R., Salakhiev M.Yu., Kislitsina T.N. - Kazan: "Fatherland", 2016. - 332 p., ill.

The seventh volume of the book contains biographical data on 2,406 servicemen who died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, whose names were established by search organizations in the course of search work on the battlefields. The information was obtained on the basis of soldiers' medallions, personal items found with the remains of dead servicemen, and as a result of archival research.

Specialists of the All-Russian Information Retrieval Center R.R.Nuriakhmetov, I.G.Prokofiev, A.N.Skoryukov, A.M.Fatykhov took part in the preparation of the database for the book.

The project uses state support funds allocated as a grant in accordance with Decree of the President of the Russian Federation No. 79-rp dated April 1, 2015 and on the basis of a competition held by the National Charitable Foundation.

The book was published with the support of the Regional Public Organization for the Promotion of Perpetuating the Memory of Defenders of the Fatherland "Zvezda", Moscow (Chairman of the Board S.Yu. Kopelchuk).

When clarifying information about the soldiers found, the information resources of the Generalized Electronic Data Bank "Memorial" of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation www.obd-memorial.ru were used.

The book is addressed to the relatives of the victims, search engines, employees of state authorities and military administration, working groups of regional publications of the Book of Memory, to everyone who is not indifferent to the fate of those who died for the Motherland.

Names from soldiers' medallions. T. 8/ Comp.: Konoplev A.Yu., Salakhiev R.R., Salakhiev M.Yu., Kislitsina T.N. - Kazan: "Fatherland", 2018. - 336 p., ill.

The eighth volume of the book contains biographical data on 1933 servicemen who died on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, whose names were established by search organizations in the course of search work on the battlefields. The information was obtained on the basis of soldiers' medallions, personal items found with the remains of dead servicemen, and as a result of archival research.

Specialists of the All-Russian Information and Search Center D.Sh.Garipova, D.M.Lukmanova, S.M.Marzoeva, R.R.Nuriakhmetov, I.G.Prokofiev, A.N.Skoryukov A.M. Fatykhov.

When clarifying the information about the soldiers found, the information resources of the electronic data banks of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation OBD "Memorial" (obd-memorial.ru), "Feat of the people" (podvig-naroda.ru) and "Memory of the people" (pamyat-naroda.ru) were used ).

Jan 29, 2007

MEDALLIONS,
IDENTIFICATION DOCUMENTS FOR MILITARY PERSONNEL IN THE RKKA

Medallion arr. 1925 "ladanka"
The soldier's medallion was used to identify the soldiers of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army who died during the fighting. Introduced by the Order of the Revolutionary Military Council of August 14, 25 No. 856 as an identity document. It was issued to all military personnel of military units after their arrival in their unit when they were enrolled in the service.
The medallion is made of tin in the form of a flat box measuring 50x33x4 mm with a ribbon for wearing on the chest. A special form of parchment, made in a typographical way, was invested in it. Very often, forms were printed on ordinary newsprint. When using this type of medallion, in the course of hostilities, it turned out that the medallion was not hermetic and the parchment sheet quickly became unusable. In 1937, this type of medallion was removed from the allowance of the army in connection with the political processes of the 30s.
These medallions, although rare, are found among soldiers who died in the Great Patriotic War.

Medallion arr. 1941
By order of the NPO of the USSR No. 138 of March 15, 1941, the "Regulations on the personal accounting of losses and burial of the dead personnel of the Red Army in wartime" and new medallions in the form of an ebonite pencil case with an insert on parchment paper in two copies were introduced. On the form of the insert, in the appropriate columns, the soldier entered:
- Full Name
- year of birth
- military rank
- native - republic, region, region, city, district, s/council, village
- family data: address, full name wife, next of kin
- which RVC is called up (district military registration and enlistment office)
- blood type according to Jansky (from I to IV)
It was forbidden to indicate the name of the military unit. There are surrogate forms on various papers, where the clerk manually entered the necessary columns, or filled out the entire medallion from the words of the soldier (there were many illiterate soldiers among the soldiers)
According to paragraph 28 of the Regulations, one copy of the insert was confiscated by the funeral team and handed over to the headquarters of the unit. The second - remained in the medallion with the deceased. On the basis of the inserts taken from the medallions, the names of the dead who remained on the battlefield were established, and lists of losses were compiled. But in reality, in the conditions of hostilities, this requirement was not met, the medallion was confiscated entirely. In addition, soldiers were often given only one copy of the insert due to their shortage.
Many soldiers went into battle without a suicide bomber. The very fact of their extradition was an infrequent matter, especially since the autumn of 1941. Moreover, there was a superstition among the soldiers that if you fill out an insert, they will kill you. Often the medallions were simply thrown away. In the capsules themselves, they carried needles, matches, and shag.
In November 1942, NPO Order No. 376 "On the removal of medallions from the supply of the Red Army" was issued. This led to an increase in the number of missing military personnel due to the impossibility of identifying the deceased.

Standard hexagonal ebonite medallion Medallion insert on parchment paper Blockade medallion Sailors medallions
wooden medallion
Wooden capsules were carved from different types of wood without impregnation in the form of a composite pencil case from a tube and a lid in conditions when it was impossible to establish the production of ebonite capsules and supply them to units of the active Army in the conditions of the outbreak of war. They, alas, well passed moisture through the body and did not provide the integrity of the liner either. They were made both at small plants and factories, and in small workshops and artels.

Steel medallion

Another type of "suicide bombers" were cylinders made of copper or brass tubes with or without thread and a lid (plug). There was a kind of metal capsule with a groove on the tube and a ledge on the lid: after putting the lid on the tube by turning the lid, it was fixed on the tube due to the entry of the ledge into the groove.
Homemade medallions
Quite often, empty cartridge cases played the role of medallions. The most "popular" among them were shells from revolvers of the "Nagant" system, Mosin rifles ("three-line"), as well as from the German 98k carbine and even from the Soviet TT pistol. Revolver and German carbine shells, as less common for ordinary Soviet soldiers, were specially used by them to make it easier for the funeral team to quickly find the desired "suicide bomber" among the belongings and ammunition of the deceased soldier. The following items could be used as cartridge case plugs to prevent moisture ingress: a bullet inserted into the case with a sharp end, followed by compression of the case with pliers or without it; a pencil inserted with a stylus inside the sleeve; wood cork from improvised materials

Red Army book
Introduced by the Order of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR of October 7, 1941 as a document proving the identity of a Red Army soldier and junior commander. The issuance of a Red Army book in exchange for a military ID or registration certificate was carried out by the part in which the Red Army soldier arrived from the district military registration and enlistment office. Sending Red Army soldiers and junior commanders to the front without Red Army books was strictly prohibited. Identity cards were issued to officers as personal documents.
The Red Army books were confiscated from the dead and those who died from wounds and transferred to the headquarters of the unit or medical institution, where, on their basis, lists of irretrievable losses of personnel were compiled.

The battle for the Caucasus is one of the largest battles of the Great Patriotic War. Apart from the blockade of Leningrad, none of the battles of this war lasted so long. From July 25, 1942 to October 9, 1943, for 422 days and nights, stubborn battles went on on the plains of the North Caucasus and the mountain passes of the Main Caucasian Range, in the Azov and Black Seas, in the sky over the Kuban. The losses of the Red Army in this battle amounted to more than 800 thousand people, while today the remains of only 115 thousand defenders of the Fatherland are buried in single and mass graves in the Krasnodar Territory. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers and officers are still not buried. The great commander of Russia A.V. Suvorov said: “The war is not over until the last soldier is buried.” The Great Patriotic War is not over, it continues, and not only because the soldiers’ bones to this day turn white on the slopes of the mountains and are annually plowed by tractors on the collective farm fields of the Krasnodar Territory, but also because the “echo of war” is still thundering explosions of ammunition that did not explode then again and again taking away human lives.
The war continues, and as in any war, there are soldiers on whose shoulders all hardships and hardships fall. Only now, six decades later, they don’t have rifles and machine guns in their hands, but metal detectors and shovels, and their name is search engines. These are people for whom search work has become a matter of life. What makes them, risking their lives, go to the place where battles thundered almost six decades ago, turn over cubic meters of swept in search of the remains of soldiers, this is not understood by an ordinary person. A search engine is primarily a state of mind and, of course, experience and knowledge acquired over the years. It is enough to see the eyes of the people to whom the guys returned a family member who was considered missing to understand that their work was not in vain. But until that moment, a difficult path has to be traveled from the study of archival documents to field search work, the discovery of the remains of soldiers and the establishment of their names.
The names of the soldiers are established both by personal nominal things and by the numbers of awards, but the most reliable way is to establish the name by the soldier's medallion. In November 1942, the order of the NPO of the USSR No. 376 “On the removal of medallions from the supply” was issued. This led to an increase in the already huge number of missing military personnel. It is difficult to understand what the authors of the unreasonable decision were guided by, but if they believed that with the introduction of the Red Army book containing all the necessary data about the fighter by order of NPO No. 330, the need to duplicate this information in the medallion disappeared, their “holy naivety” was very expensive. On the territory of the region, the fighting was mainly carried out after the infamous order. Practical experience shows that in the Kuban a soldier's medallion can be found only in one case out of eighty, which explains the low rate of establishing the names of the dead compared to other regions of the Russian Federation, where hostilities were fought in 1941-1942.
Even if you were lucky and managed to find a soldier's medallion, this does not guarantee that the soldier's name will be returned, and the family member will be returned to relatives. If water has penetrated into the capsule with a paper liner or condensation has accumulated in it, then it will be damaged. Inept handling of the medallion can also lead to damage to the paper insert. This methodological manual contains the experience gained by the search associations of Russia in identifying the identity of the discovered servicemen who died during the Second World War. Military personnel of the Romanian, Slovak, Hungarian and other armies took part in the hostilities on the territory of the Krasnodar Territory on the side of Nazi Germany, therefore it would be correct to state the experience gained not only in establishing the names of soldiers and officers of the Red Army, but also of all other armies that took part in the Battle for the Caucasus.

1. HISTORY OF THE CREATION OF PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION SIGNS (LOZ)

The problem of accounting for irretrievable losses and identifying the identities of the dead is more than one hundred years old. In different states, it was solved in different ways. The warriors of Genghis Khan, leaving for the battle, left the stones, and returning they took them back. The number of stones remaining indicated the death toll. However, this method gave only an idea of the number of dead soldiers and did not allow to establish their names. In Rus', in the same period, each warrior wore two icons on his body, one with the image of the patron saint of the principality, of which he was a warrior, the other with the face of the patron saint name of the owner. Thus, at the funeral of the fallen, the names of the soldiers and the names of their principalities were pronounced. In the conditions of a small population and a wide variety of names, this method partially justified itself, but at the same time was imperfect.
The first attempts to create personal identification marks have their roots in Germany in the mid-60s of the 19th century. It was then that a certain Berlin shoemaker, whose sons served in the Prussian army and went to war, made tin tags for them. With their help, someone had to identify the sons in the event of their death and notify the father in Berlin.
The shoemaker was so proud of his invention that he dared to turn to the Prussian War Ministry with a proposal to introduce similar signs throughout the Prussian army. The proposal was sensible, but the shoemaker came up with an unsuccessful argument. He referred to the successful experience of using special dog tags in Prussia to record them and collect taxes from owners. When the discussion of the new idea in the War Office reached the king, King Wilhelm I of Prussia, who adored his soldiers, was simply furious at the proposal to put "dog tags" on them. Only after some time did he nevertheless allow himself to be convinced of the benefits of this idea and, for the sake of experiment, agreed to the introduction of personal identification marks in some parts of the Prussian army.
Such is the legend. But in fact, the introduction of the first personal identification marks during the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 met with massive rejection of the innovation on the part of even the most disciplined Prussian soldiers. They simply threw away the LOZ issued to them in droves, at best they were "forgotten" in the wagon train. The fact is that any soldier in the war sooner or later becomes superstitious, especially regarding death. Therefore, the requirement of the commanders to wear the “herald of death” aroused among the Prussian soldiers a superstitious fear that just this “messenger” would bring upon them a quick death. Only the active propaganda by Wehrmacht officers among their soldiers of the need to constantly wear LOS, as a guarantee of receiving a pension by the soldier’s relatives in the event of his death, turned the tide and wearing personal identification marks became the norm. The order of the Ministry of War of the Prussian Army of April 29, 1869 obliged each soldier to wear a tin tag on his naked body under a uniform on a cord, indicating the unit and the number of the owner of the badge in the lists of this unit.
The appearance on January 10, 1878 of a new military medical charter stipulated a change in the shape of the LOZ from rectangular to oval, which it remained later. In 1914, Germany abandoned the system of applying only the name of the unit and the personal number of the owner to the personal identification mark, which led to an increase in the size of the mark, and in 1915 a single size of the LOZ was established. On September 16, 1917, there was an instruction to duplicate the inscriptions on the upper and lower parts of the LOS, and for the convenience of breaking them, to divide the sign with three narrow slits along the long axis of the oval. It remained in this form until 1945.
In Russia, the first attempts to introduce personal identification marks were made during the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878. It was then, before being sent to the theater of operations in Bulgaria, that all soldiers and officers received metal dog tags with a cord to wear around their necks. A letter was embossed on them - abbreviations of the name of the regiment (for example: L.G.E.P. - Life Guards Jaeger Regiment), the number of the battalion, company and personal number of the serviceman. Lists of soldiers and officers with personal numbers were kept in the regimental office. This was done to identify the dead and wounded. However, then this innovation was not widely used, and over time it was completely forgotten.
In the last days of the existence of the tsarist empire, the Minister of War, Infantry General Belyaev, signed a special order: “The Sovereign Emperor, on the 16th day of January 1917, commanded the highest to establish a special neck badge to identify the wounded and killed, as well as to mark the St. George awards of the lower ranks according to the proposed with this drawing. With such a high will, I announce by the military department with the indication that the sign should be worn on a snuria or braid worn around the neck, and the entry enclosed in it should be printed on parchment paper. The neck badge was an amulet with a form inside, the size of a tram ticket. The serviceman had to manage to enter a lot of information about himself in a beaded and preferably calligraphic handwriting. Indicate your regiment, company, squadron or hundred, rank first name last name, awards, religion, estate, province, county, volost and village. At that time, only a small part of the signs made had time to leave for the troops.
Eight years later, the royal neck badge began to be used in the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army and Navy as an identity document and for identification by order of the Revolutionary Military Council No. 856 of 08/14/25. A new item of equipment and an indefinite thing was issued to all military personnel and civilians. The medallion belonged to the service items and, in case of loss, was replaced with a new one. During the Finnish company, it turned out that the medallion was not hermetic and in the conditions of hostilities the paper insert blurred beyond recognition. It was canceled in March 1941. At the same time, by another order of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR No. 138 dated March 15, 1941, a medallion of a different type was introduced into the troops. With him, the Red Army met the war.
In the cavity of a soldier's medallion of the 1941 model, a soldier and an officer kept two forms with personal biographical data. If he died, then one copy had to be removed by the funeral team at the headquarters of the unit, thus losses were recorded and their lists were compiled. Well, the second was supposed to be left in the medallion with the deceased. In combat conditions, this requirement was practically not met. The soldier's medallion was taken entirely. And there was one more nameless soldier.
Do not blame someone for carelessness or incompetence here. First of all, the instruction was violated due to the complex use of a service item, which was not perfect in other senses. It took too many actions to remove the medallion from the deceased. First, find it in one of the pockets, remove the screw cover of the case, pull out one of the forms, leaving the other, close it again and finally return it to the pocket. Not everyone could stand the long procedure under machine-gun fire. In November 1942, by Order of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR No. 376 "On the removal of medallions from supplies," soldier's medallions were canceled. The soldiers' medallions, rejected in the very middle of the military hard times, never returned to the privates and sergeants of either the Soviet or the Russian army.

The soldier's medallion, introduced by the Order of the Revolutionary Military Council No. 856 of 08/14/25, was a box made of tin measuring 50x33x4 mm with an eyelet for braid (Fig. 1). Inside was a paper insert.
By order of the NPO of the USSR No. 138 dated March 15, 1941, new medallions were introduced in the form of a plastic pencil case with a paper insert (Fig. 2). Also, soldier medallions of the 1941 model were made in metal and wooden versions. Despite such a variety of designs, plastic soldiers' medallions are the most common on the territory of the region. In the cavity of the medallion there was a paper insert of the established sample (Fig. 3), containing information about the last name, first name, patronymic, military rank, date of birth, address of the owner and his closest relatives. Paper insert size 40x180 mm. The capsule is made of black or brown plastic and consists of a body and a lid with a threaded connection. Capsule length 50 mm. At the same time, it should be noted that the paper insert, intended for servicemen of the border units of the NKVD troops, had a slightly larger size: 53x280 mm and a vertical green strip 5 mm wide along the entire length. The contents of both paper inserts were almost identical. In November 1942, by Order of the NPO of the USSR No. 376, the medallions were withdrawn from supply.
At the same time, in various regions of the Krasnodar Territory, there were cases of discovery of soldiers' medallions of an unspecified pattern, made in the factory (Fig. 4). These personal identification marks are made of aluminum alloy, and despite the difference in forms, they are similar in content. In the upper part there is a hole with a diameter of 5 mm. The LOZ contains information about the actual or conditional name of the military unit and the personal number of the owner.
One of the forms of homemade soldier medallions was notes containing information about the owner inserted into shell casings, while their muzzle, as a rule, was closed by a bullet turned upside down.