Sergey Aleksandrovich Kuskov,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Joint State Archives of the Chelyabinsk Region, Chelyabinsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Evacuation Hospitals during the Great Patriotic War: Current Situation and Opportunities for Studying the Topic
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2025-2-5
The article describes how historians have been studying evacuation hospitals over the past 60 years. This article also discusses the possibilities for further exploration of this topic. The author reports on the growing importance of archival sources for writing scientific papers about evacuation hospitals during the Great Patriotic War. He also complains that the documents of the evacuation hospitals are still concentrated in central departmental archives and that historians, especially provincial researchers, do not have sufficient access to them. To correct this problem, the author proposed to transfer military medical records to civilian archives and improve their funding. The article also identifies other difficulties that hinder researchers: the lack of original hypotheses, weak interest in the topic on the part of foreign researchers, narrow territorial coverage of research, and the shift of research interest to other topics. The author suggested that expanding the territorial boundaries of the research, as well as comparing military medical institutions from different countries that participated in World War II, would help solve these problems. The author also pointed out the uniqueness of Soviet military medicine during the war of 1941–1945, which excludes the expansion of the scope of research to adjacent chronological periods. The article also notes that researchers of evacuation hospitals have not completely abandoned the Soviet conceptual paradigm, but this theoretical basis is not sufficient to generalize and interpret all the collected facts. The author shows that in order to develop original concepts for the development of evacuation hospitals, ego-documents created by the organizers of military medicine and war participants are necessary.
Publishing: 28/04/2025
The article has been received by the editor on 20/01/2025
How to cite: Kuskov S.A. Evacuation Hospitals during the Great Patriotic War: Current Situation and Opportunities for Studying the Topic // Historical Courier, 2025, No. 2 (40), pp. 68–77. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2025/ISTKURIER-2025-2-05.pdf]
Links: Issue 2 2025
Keywords: evacuation hospitals; Great Patriotic War; archival documents; interpretation of historical documents; historiography