In the last 12 years alone, the Tracing and Information Center of the Russian Red Cross (RRC), which is the oldest humanitarian agency in Russia, received nearly 250,000 requests. Almost 21,000 people found their loved ones. This year the RRC Tracing and Information Center celebrates its 78th anniversary. During this time period there have been accumulated 18 mln files at the TIC’s archive.
The Tracing and Information Center (TIC) of the Russian Red Cross was founded on March 11, 1945. It is the 3rd largest tracing service of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in the world after tracing services of the National Societies of Germany and Poland.
At present, the TIC RRC carries out its activities on several spheres. The first, the TIC traces family members lost during World War II and the Great Patriotic War. The second, the TIC staff assists in establishing the integrity of the graves of Soviet soldiers who died during the Great Patriotic War. The third sphere of activity is restoring family link interrupted as a result of emergencies, the Ukrainian crisis inclusive. The fourth, the TIC RRC carries out searches for migrants and refugees.
“Since 2011, nearly 250,000 people applied to our Tracing and Information Center, who were searching for information on their relatives and loved ones, lost during the Great Patriotic War. More than 103,5 thousand people searched for persons went missing, those who had been sent for forced labors or the burial grounds of their relatives. More than 110,000 were searching for their evacuated relatives. Over the past 12 years our staff managed to complete about 46,000 cases. Nearly 21,000 cases have been completed positively. This means that we have found all the requested information on the missing relatives of the applicants”, – highlighted Pavel Savchuk, the President of the Russian Red Cross.
There are more than 18 million documents at the TIC RRC’s archive. Most of them, more than 8 million files, are case records of persons evacuated during the Great Patriotic War from the western regions of the USSR to the interior of the country. Another 5 million documents make part of the registration file, which has been kept since 1945. It consists of case records on missing persons and applicants’ case records. Once the tracing is completed, the search result is indicated at the backside of the missing person’s case record.
More than 4 million documents are case records of the children from orphanages and schoolchildren who were evacuated during the Great Patriotic War with child-care facilities. These include documents of children whose parents had been repressed.
More than a million of files are kept in the archive on displaced persons, the Soviet citizens, who had been displaced to Germany for forced labors during the Great Patriotic War, or had been imprisoned in concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps.
“Our archive has been collected since 1945 and was replenished due to the fact that the Soviet Red Cross Society received documents from various state agencies, such as the Ministry for Home Affairs, the NKVD (the Soviet Secret Police Agency), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Soviet military administrations in Germany and Austria, – commented the General Director of the TIC RRC, Sergey Kobets. – The main difference between the TIC RRC and other non-profit entities and resources that help people find their relatives, lost during the Soviet period, is our cross-border nature. For instance, we help to trace the fate of relatives who died outside of Russia, or in cases, when the applicants themselves live in another country”.
Besides helping those, who is looking for relatives lost in the Soviet times, the RRC Tracing and Information Center helps restore family links to those suffered of various emergencies. In 2022-2023, the major bulk of requests for tracing of loved ones are related to the Ukrainian crisis. Since February 2022, the Russian Red Cross specialists have received over 17,000 requests to restore family links of those suffered of the Ukrainian crisis.
“People who have lost relatives as a result of the Ukrainian crisis can submit requests to the RRC Tracing and Information Center. After putting in contact with the applicants, our specialists collect the requests into our own database and also send them to the ICRC’s Central Tracing Agency (CTA). There, requests from all over the world are collected in a single database. When there is a match, we connect people with each other, – commented Taras Letik, the Head of the RFL department. – So far, collectively with our colleagues from the ICRC’s CTA, we have managed to find more than 100 people”.
In our searches we also use technology introduced by colleagues from the International Committee of the Red Cross and focus on the protection of personal data of applicants and missing persons. Thus, once a person is found, the RRC specialists contact the person and clarify whether he/she is looking for relatives and whether he/she is acquainted with the applicant. Only afterwards there is the exchange of contacts between the traced person and the applicant.
Beyond that, the specialists at the TIC RRC help people, who have found each other, but are staying in different regions of Russia, to purchase tickets and get to these regions. So far, 52 people have received such type of assistance.
