The Tragedy of the “Black Infantry”: A Problems of Studying Mobilization 1943—1944 And the Calculation of Irrecoverable Losses (On the Materials of Bohuslavshchyna)

Abstract

The problem of calculating the real amount of losses among the persons who were mobilized to the Red Army in 1943—1944 in Ukraine in violation of the rules and called “black infantry” despite the active interest still gives rise to politicized discussions not supported by historical sources.

The purpose of the article is to present the results of the author’s methodology approbation for processing a complex of previously known and recently discovered documents and other sources, which allows us to approach the solution of the problem of calculating the losses of the “black infantry”. Clarifying the meaning of this term, the author proposes a correction of other concepts related to the simplified military mobilization procedure.

The research methodology is outlined by the principles of scientificity, historicism, objectivity, and systematicity. During the search, identification and selection of sources, the methods of scientific heuristics, in particular archival, classification and systematization, methods of working with mass sources were used. General scientific methods of analysis, synthesis and statistical methods, methods of source criticism, source analysis and synthesis were used to develop the updated source base. In the process of interpreting the problem in general and the obtained data in particular, the author relies on historical-genetic, historical-systemic and historical comparative methods.

The scientific novelty of the study consists in the reconstruction of the features of the military draft of 1944 on the example of the population of the Bohuslav district of the Kyiv region.

The differences between forced mobilization and the work of “field military commissions” are characterized. Based on the content analysis of the lists of mobilized people, the ratio between those who survived and those who died (missing) was determined, the peculiarities of the “black infantry” as a separate category of mobilized citizens were revealed, and their actual number in certain villages of Bohuslav region during the research period was determined. On the basis of the documents of the Kyiv State Archive and the Bohuslav District Military Commissariat, it is shown the possibility of actual accounting of military losses for a certain category of people which is not just “missed”. The received data was verified with the lists of the Books of Memory of Ukraine. The complex of sources represented in the study is a completely relevant practical task of calculating and clarifying the losses of the Ukrainian “black infantry” in 1943—1944.