Thousands of Names Historical and Cultural Project
The large-scale historical and cultural projects Thousands of Names is designed for finding burial locations of the soldiers who died during World War I in the present-day Kaliningrad Region, recording their names, and finding their descendants, thus restoring the historic ties disrupted by the events of the 20th century.
The project was initiated by the GS Group. It is based on the results of many years of joint efforts by the volunteers of the Technopolis GS Innovation Cluster, local history experts, and museum and archive employees. The GS Group involves historic archives, higher education institution, research institutes, as well as foreign organizations and volunteer associations of Kaliningrad Region and Russia in the project.
There are three key areas of focus in the Thousands of Names project:
- Finding World War I gravesites and putting them in order, including building memorials that commemorate the names of those who died, as well as providing subsequent regular care for the sites. Participants of the volunteer movement organized by the employees of Technopolis GS supported by the GS Group Holding are the ones who work on and take care of the war burial sites. As of today, there are 14 sites that have been put in order and volunteers continue to care for them;
- Research of archive documents to find new information about burial sites and building an electronic data base about the World War I soldiers who were buried in the Kaliningrad Region;
- Organizing memorial events to commemorate the experiences of World War I.
In June 2019, the GS Group and the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (BFU) signed a cooperation agreement as part of the Thousands of Names project. The synergy of efforts enables naming each and every Russian soldier who died during the war and commemorating them on mass graves, as well as learning their background and subsequently finding their descendants and completing their family histories.
Over 1,200 names of Russian soldiers buried in the Kaliningrad Region were found in cooperation with the Immanuel Kant BFU and the local history experts. The work continues to this day.
A new stage in the project was studying archive documents and building a data base of the two large World War I mass graves in Kaliningrad Region located near Dalneye and Osipenko settlements, where 239 soldiers were buried.
At the initiative of the GS Group, the experts studied documents of the Russian State Military Archive and the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg. As a result, personal information of all 239 soldiers became known: their draft location, the name of their regiment, military rank, marital status, religion; for some their ages and class were also found. The cities, towns, and villages from which they were drafted are now located in 25 constituent entities of Russia, as well as in 6 other countries. Work is underway with historians and local history experts, public organizations, and media in the present-day Russian regions that correspond to those localities.
