Ego-Documents of Siberians on the History of the Great Patriotic War: Document Flow Analysis

Abstract

For studying the Great Patriotic War history, the testimonies of direct participants and eyewitnesses of the events of the war years are of great importance. The purpose of the article is to give a comprehensive description of documents of personal origin (memoirs, diaries, letters) reflecting the participation of Siberians (soldiers and home front workers) in the Great Patriotic War. The article designates these documents by the generalizing term “ego-documents”, generally accepted in the social sciences and humanities. The authors make a brief review of domestic and foreign publications on the introduction into scientific circulation and the evolution of the concept of “ego-document”. To solve the research problems, they identified a documentary stream (DS) of publications containing ego-documents. It was based on the materials of the bibliographic database (DB) “Scientific Siberica: nature, history, economics, culture, science of Siberia and the Far East” (“Nauchnaya Sibirika: priroda, istoriya, ekonomika, kultura, nauka Sibiri i Dalnego Vostoka”), generated by the SPSTL SB RAS, supplemented by data of publications from other authoritative sources. The article presents a bibliometric analysis of the DS content: the type-species composition of publications, types of ego-documents, the dynamics of publications in a time perspective (1945–2022), geographical data on the places of conscription, the residence of ego-documents authors, topics of publications, etc. An overview of some number of ego-documents publications from DS is given. Research results: a steady dynamics of quantitative increase in publications of ego-documents has been revealed since the 90s. XX century; the diversity of the type-species structure of DS was determined; the geographical connection of DS publications with the territories of 20 regions of Siberia and the Far East is shown; the main topics of ego-documents have been identified with a brief description of individual publications.