Региональная история и краеведение

During the Great Patriotic War, the rear areas of the country became centres where a network of evacuation and local hospitals was created. One of those regions was the Saratov Volga region. The paper considers the patriotic movements that unfolded in Saratov and the region to provide various assistance from the population to hospitals in which wounded soldiers and officers of the Red Army were treated. The author comes to the conclusion that people of the city and villagers immediately responded to the calls of the local authorities for help.

The article examines the activities of the American Relief Administration (ARA), a US charitable organization in Russia, during the mass famine of 1921–1923, and shows its specific role in eliminating hunger in the Saratov Volga region. 300 employees who came from America and about 10,000 Soviet citizens were involved in providing assistance. The humanitarian mission helped starving children and the sick with food, clothing, and meditsines, primarily in the most famine-stricken provinces of the Volga region.

This article examines how informal connections of A. A. Geraklitov (1867–1933), established during his work in the Saratov Scientific Archival Commission (SSAC, Russian: Саратовская ученая архивная комиссия, СУАК) in 1908–1917, influenced his path in historical science. Based on the materials of personal correspondence, the circle of his closest comrades in the commission is outlined, through which a certain idea is given about the social and intellectual aspects of the SSAC.

The article presents for the first time the biography of Saratov voivode Grigory Fedorovich Elizarov, as well as brief information about his ancestors, the Murom nobles. G. F. Elizarov began his service at the court of Tsar Ivan the Terrible in the late 1570s. Under tsars Fyodor Ivanovich and Boris Godunov, he served for a long time as an elected nobleman in Murom, and in this rank was appointed to Saratov. Having become a Moscow nobleman under False Dmitry I, G. F. Elizarov in 1606 led the opposition to Tsar Vasily Shuisky in the Murom district.

The article presents a general picture of the involvement of human contingents from the Saratov region to recruit the Armed Forces of the USSR on the eve and during the Great Patriotic War. The article highlights in detail the conduct of three waves of the so-called general mobilization of the military in 1941, subsequent party-komsomol and other special mobilizations, as well as the regular conscription of recruits in 1942–1945. The role of the training of military-trained reserves through Vsevobuch, the people’s militia and defense organizations is shown.

The article shows the most important aspects of the life of the German villages of the Volga region in 1918 using specific facts and examples. An important tool for consolidating the power of the Bolsheviks on the ground were the Red Guard formations created by them, the main requirement for which was to protect the new government and ensure the implementation of its policy on the ground. Performing their functions, these detachments often used repressive methods of treating peasants up to their murder, especially when food and other property were seized from them. 

The article attempts to analyze the problem of identifying subbotniks through the prism of regional refraction, using the example of Saratov province as one of the sectarian centres of residence in the period under consideration. Subbotniks strove for the reception of Old Testament texts, religious traditions and ritual practices, under the influence of which the sectarians’ identity had been developing. The author also examined the origins of subbotniks in the region, their numbers, settlement areas and the building of contacts with normative Judaism supporters.