Since 1960, military documents about the Second World War have been produced in the form of microfilms

Since 1960, the USSR Ministry of Defense began publishing a collection of military documents from the period of the Great Patriotic War in microfilm format. This decision was made to save resources and speed up work, according to documents declassified on July 2 by the Russian Ministry of Defense, published on the Defense Department's website.

Back in 1959, a group of 15 officers and researchers was allocated from the archive to work on the selection of documents for the future collection. They were divided into two subgroups. It was planned to complete the work by August 1, 1960, after which all the selected materials were to be transferred to the Department of the History of the Great Patriotic War of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism.

"In order to speed up bringing documentary materials from the period of the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945 to researchers and reduce the cost of publishing them, the Archive of the Ministry of Defense, instead of Collections of combat documents published by printing, began publishing originals of combat documents on the main operations of the Great Patriotic War in the form of microfilms in 1960," the deputy chief said in a directive. The General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces for military scientific work on the organization of the use, accounting and storage of microfilms.

As noted in the Ministry of Defense, the preparation and printing of collections in the usual typographic way required a lot of money and considerable time. The transition to microfilm made it possible to bring authentic combat documents to researchers faster.

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