Soviet Records

Twentieth Century Records:
Soviet Records of Lyakhovichi Residents and Emigres
(from 1939 until the end of the Soviet system) by Deborah G. Glassman, copyright.

This page looks at records created in the time period beginning with the Soviet acquisition of the region just before World War II, and the page is still more hope than actuality. The hard work of identifying all of the variety of records that can be searched in the archives of the Soviet Union and the Belarus Socialist Republic, by the birth residence of a citizen, is a task for another research group with a wider focus. We can only look at those materials that are currently known and begin the extraction process of Jewish residents of Lyakhovichi and its immediate surroundings. We are aided by the Soviet system of identifying all residents by their nationality, and defining the Jews in Soviet domains, as of the "nationality" Jewish. Further, their early attempts at nation-wide registration of all citizens, used a birth date and specific town of birth, as a way to distinguish between many people with the same name. So as more records are made available and entered into databases, we will find that we can identify Jewish men and women born in Lyakhovichi even when they are resident far from their birthplaces in the soviets of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, the Russian Siberian regions, and the far inland cities of the Russian state.

The last generation of Jews to be born in Lyakhovichi, were born there before the Second World War.. No significant numbers of Jews returned to the 500 year old community, following the annihilation of the Jewish population by the Nazis. Jews born in Lyakhovichi who died elsewhere in the Soviet Union (unless they were murdered by the Nazis or died during an enemy action in World War II) had a death certificate prepared in the city in which they died and that record was recorded in the central registry of that Soviet. In 2007, I have not yet heard of a way to search other than by name of the deceased in a specific town of death. If you have copies of Soviet death records showing a Lyakhovichi town of birth, please share your images for posting here. Soviet marriage records of those born in Lyakhovichi (so mostly from the 1940s through 1960s) will be found in the Soviet cities where they lived. Those created in Lyakhovichi, in the short period of Soviet occupation before the war, have not been separately identified but are presumably with the ZAGs records of the community under the jurisdiction of the Belarus Ministry of Justice. Again, Soviet era marriage records show the place of birth and the legal nationality of the marrying parties.

There are several types of records immediately available and each is suggestive of many more waiting to be found in the archives of Russia and the former Soviets.

The records that are among the first to come to light, are those related to the military service of Soviet citizens in the "Great Patriotic War," as World War II is still best known in the former Soviet republics. Lyakhovichi-born men and women, who fled the German invasion and German captivity and made it to the Soviet border, were usually drafted into the Soviet Army almost immediately. Some, having not made it out of German-held territory, were able to join up with partisans, some of which partisan groups were connected to the Soviets. And another group, who had fled during World War I to the safe havens of Slutsk and Minsk, had found themselves unable to escape from the Soviet Union in its earliest days, and with the Germans on the doorstep in WWII fled inland or joined up with the Red Army to fight back. As efforts to document the service to a nation while the veterans were still alive, picked up speed in the 1980s and 1990s, genealogists were among the beneficiaries. Official lists of veterans were combed by other veterans who looked for their units to document. A Jewish veteran's group gathered the names of Jewish soldiers who had died in World War II, from those lists into a series of publications. The compilation of books called Kniga pamiati voinov-evreev pavshikh v boiakh s natsizmom: 1941-1945 (Book of Memory of Jewish Soldiers who fell in battle with Nazism 1941-1945) was published in Moscow, from 1994 to 2002. It is a remarkable source on those who actually died in the Soviet Armed forces. Each volume contains an alphabetically arranged set of short biographic descriptions. Name, place of birth and residence, rank, military specialty, where the person perished, and the source of this information is provided for almost all. Photos on some appear as well. It is available in the United States at the Library of Congress; Yeshiva University; Princeton University; Yale University Library; University of Chicago, Stanford University; and a number of others. But of the eight different volumes shown in worldcat.org (for finding a book title in a library), most do not even have two years of publication at the same library, a situation calling out for scanning and digitization. If you would like to participate in a simple user-conducted collaborative effort, you could photocopy pages at a library and then send them to JewishGen's ViewMate for community translation. Copyright considerations may preclude them being posted for longer than is necessary to gain translation. If ViewMate is not available for this type of project and you think that you have found Lyakhovichi people or people who share names of your family members from Lyakhovichi, send them to us and if they are relevant, we will post the extracted information. If you have already examined pages from this material and found soldiers from our region of Belarus, we will happily post the extracted information on our site. Additional Military Service information is also available from the Military History Archive in Moscow (RGVIA) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv and the Russian State Archive of the Navy in St. Petersburg (RGAVMF) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota. These sources are most useful if the length of service did not entirely coincide with World War II. Also, as in most military systems, there is a great deal more material on officers than on enlisted men. The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People have identified a number of records in the Naval Historic Archives on Jewish sailors and officers. To send for these records, it is important to remember that Archivists anywhere are not set up to do individual genealogical searches. You should know your party's name and at least the approximate years and branch of service.

Those who would uncover archival documents, are always engaged in the process of deciding which projects to fund and staff first. The Soviet government had a real policy of denigrating all Jewish materials in Soviet state archives to a category of "third level" which they defined as of "no historical value." An archivist was not encouraged to spend his time cataloging such material when there was so much more relevant work to do. State Archives were actively dissuaded from spending limited resources conserving such material. When the Soviet system fell apart, the newly independent nations found themselves without the cash resources to maintain the parts of its collections long-recognized as national treasures, much less the Jewish sections, which had long been neglected. Jewish historical, genealogical, and academic organizations, would like the volunteers to staff every project and the money to fund all of them, but lacking that, information related to the Holocaust has usually taken priority, as we want to identify the dead and missing, in the lifetimes of those that still mourn them.

An estimated 1 million Jews were deported from the western sections of the Soviet Union to the Soviet interior and the Soviet Asiatic nations, by Stalin, between the 1930s and 1942. Some went to political prisons, some's fate were never determined, and some had the happy fate of being sent inland as "unreliable in the face of a German occupation." The last group and their families were sent reeling across the Soviet landscape, to end up in relative safety, in the various Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tadzhikistan. Others found themselves in the Siberian tribal lands of the Russian Federation. Please do not call these people EVACUEES. There was no benevolent intent by the Soviets in these forcible moves that dropped unprepared people thousand of miles from home with little warning or preparation. They were victims of a system that did not care whether they lived or died in the move and many died. Even those whose warrant was served as the Nazis entered Soviet territory, owed no thanks to the Soviets for hauling them off to prison or confinement in another Soviet territory. The Soviet government deported Jews, Poles, Crimeans, Ukrainians, and dozens of other nationalities. It did not matter to them if hundreds of thousands or millions died, it was simply irrelevant. In Belarus and Western Ukraina, the two years between the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact in 1939 and the Nazi invasion, saw over 1 million people, from every walk of life deported by the Soviets. Put into train cars and sent east, most were never reunited with their families who never learned their fate. Lyakhovichi victims of this persecution included those who were identified with teaching, government services, banking, merchants, small business owners, veterans of the Polish Army, and others. We have some names of Lyakhovichi natives who died in Tashkent, others who died in Siberia: most of those who died in the Soviet forcible relocations are as undocumented as those who died at the hands of Nazi murderers. But those who survived, were registered. And some of those who did not make it through the hardships of Siberian and North Asian winters unprepared, did manage to meet the Soviet requirement to register first. Those who arrived in the central Asian nations had to register quickly with the authorities, and the cards they filled in, give (in the following order): Surname; Given Name; Patronymic; Birth year; gender; the town from which evacuated; Province from which evacuated; and an ID number. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum funded a project headed by Professor Saidjon Kurbanov, working in the Central State Archives of Uzbekistan, in the city of Tashkent. He and his group of researchers waded through a quarter-million registry cards, which with dependents, included almost 340,000 individuals who were registered in Uzbekistan in February 1942. Professor Kurbanov reports that as large as this group of cards is, it is only a fraction of those who came to Uzbekistan. It does not include those whose arrival point was an Uzhbek city other than Tashkent. It does not include those whose arrival date was after February 1942. It does not include those families who joined up with the deportee, not having been included in the deportation order. With all of those exclusions, Professor Kurbanov's task and resolution of the same, was remarkable. His group carefully handled and processed all of that material to end up with a group of around 152,000 Jewish registration cards (the remainder were for deportees of other nationalities). Each was scanned and is available for study at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. For this webpage, the webmaster has extracted just those names where the last residence was Lyakhovichi or Baranovichi, and so far we have found over 200+ names. Open JewishGen's site Jewish Refugees in Tashkent, in another window, to learn more about the database and to see images of the actual registration cards for each. You can use our list of names in side by side windows to gain names from our towns and then see the actual records for each person. Then simply close that window and return to research on this page. These kinds of records are incredibly valuable, and are probably in existence in more places. According to various sources, the area around Lyakhovichi also saw deportations on a large scale to Kazakhstan (over five million former Polish subjects including Poles, military veterans, bourgeois of all descriptions, and Jews, were deported to Kazakhstan just before and in the early days of World War II). If your research or reading or personal knowledge of archives has made you aware of the identification of similar groups of records in other State Archives, please let us know!

Soviet National Identity Cards

The twenty-four pages of a typical Soviet "identity card" bely the image that goes with the English word "card." This was not a simple wallet-sized document that one carried casually. This was a document without which you could not get housing, or a job, or travel from one city to another. If you were a person in your fifties who had grown up in the Soviet system, your identity papers included three photographs, one taken at age 16, one at age 25, and a final one at 45. You were required to notify the Ministry of Internal Affairs of a change of address, and that address had to be in a city in which you were previously authorized to live. The repository that holds the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs is the State Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow (GARF) - Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii. This is the same archive that holds records of the judicial, criminal investigation, and penal systems. This archive has de-classified many of its holdings, and allows research, by competent authorities, without major restriction. Information on this archive is from Archeo BiblioBase, a site maintained by the East View Information Services and published online at the ArcheoBiblioBase Russian Archives. We need the knowledge from your experience in this archive. What kind of indices are available to aid in a search for these identity documents? Are the index materials themselves available for photoduplication? Are there other Soviet era documents that we should search for instead or sooner because of easier access or reference tools?

The Russo-Finnish War

While Lyakhovichi was not part of the Soviet Union until 1939, Lechovichers who had been living in Russian cities like Minsk and Slutsk as early as 1921 were reported in Soviet records. World War Two was not the first time Lyakhovichi's Jews served in the armies of the Soviet Union. The Russo-Finnish War was one in which they participated. A Lechovicher named Karabelnik who met up with Wilfred Kay (ne Shlomo Katz) when Wilfred made his way home from a Soviet orphanage to the Lyakhovichi area to look for his family in 1945. Karabelnik had been born in Lyakhovichi, lived in Baranovichi, and was drafted for the Finnish War. He was among the tens of thousands captured by the Finns and served out World War II in a Finnish prisoner of war camp. He was more fortunate than many - having gone home first to look for his family, he made his way out of Soviet lands while it was still possible in 1945. The Soviet government viewed most who had been in Finnish prisoner camps as traitors and sent them to prison camps and gulags in Siberia.