Abstract

The scale and structure of the losses of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War undoubtedly constitute a relevant academic problem. A separate aspect of this problem is the national structure of the losses of the Red Army. So far, in the works covering this issue, researchers have made attempts to establish the national structure of the irretrievable losses of the Red Army using calculation method, based on the erroneous assumption that losses were proportional to the representation of each Soviet ethnic group in the Red Army. This study is based on the albums of the payroll of the Red Army personnel. They were prepared by the General Staff twice a year (ahead of 1 January and 1 July) for the top leaders of the country and the armed forces, and were made even prior to the war. These unique statistical sources that have become available in recent years and are stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation make it possible to partly solve the problem in relation to the establishment of the national structure of the sanitary losses suffered by the Red Army in 1943–1945 (registration of irretrievable losses by nationality was not conducted). The statistical analysis of these sources has showed that the level and structure of sanitary losses among different ethnic groups varied in a fairly wide range and depended on a large number of factors, the major one being the percentage of the ethnic group in the rank and file of the infantry. Being a member of the rank and file almost always, for all nationalities, meant an increased risk of being killed or wounded. This risk, as the study showed, was also amplified if an ordinary soldier belonged to the rifle troops. Although the obtained data cannot be mechanically extrapolated to all the losses of the Red Army as a whole, they nevertheless give an idea of the patterns in the number of losses of different nationalities, at least in the second and third periods of the war (1943–1945), and open prospects for further scholarly debate.