Digging for Their Lives: Russia’s Volunteer Body Hunters. By Lucy Ash.

Volunteers Marina Koutchinskaya(l) and Olga Ivshina (r) look for the remains of Russia’s missing-in-action World War II soldiers.

Digging for their lives: Russia’s volunteer body hunters. By Lucy Ash. BBC News, January 12, 2014.

Ash:

Of the estimated 70 million people killed in World War Two, 26 million died on the Eastern front – and up to four million of them are still officially considered missing in action. But volunteers are now searching the former battlefields for the soldiers' remains, determined to give them a proper burial – and a name.


Olga Ivshina walks slowly and carefully through the pine trees, the beeps of her metal detector punctuating the quiet of the forest. “They are not buried very deep,” she says.

 

“Sometimes we find them just beneath the moss and a few layers of fallen leaves. They are still lying where they fell. The soldiers are waiting for us – waiting for the chance to finally go home.”

 

Nearby, Marina Koutchinskaya is on her knees searching in the mud. For the past 12 years she has spent most of her holidays like this, far away from home, her maternity clothes business, and her young son.

 

“Every spring, summer and autumn I get this strange sort of yearning inside me to go and look for the soldiers,” she says. “My heart pulls me to do this work.”

 

They are part of a group called Exploration who have travelled for 24 hours in a cramped army truck to get to this forest near St Petersburg. Conditions are basic – they camp in the woods – and some days they have to wade waist-deep through mud to find the bodies of the fallen. The work can be dangerous, too. Soldiers are regularly discovered with their grenades still in their backpacks and artillery shells can be seen sticking out of the trees. Diggers from other groups elsewhere in Russia have lost their lives.

 

Marina holds up an object she has found, it looks like a bar of soap, but it is actually TNT. “Near a naked flame it’s still dangerous, even though it has been lying in the ground for 70 years,” she says.

 

Many countries were scarred by World War Two, but none suffered as many losses as the Soviet Union.

 

On 22 June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest and bloodiest campaign in military history, aimed at annexing vast areas of the USSR to the Third Reich. St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, was one of his main targets. In less than three months, the advancing German army had encircled the city and started pounding it from the air.

 

But attempts to take the city by storm fell through, so Hitler decided to starve it into surrender. For more than two years, the Red Army fought desperately to cut through German lines.

 

Olga and Marina are working near the town of Lyuban, 80km (50 miles) south of St Petersburg. Here, in an area of just 10 sq km, an estimated 19,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in just a few days in 1942. So far the diggers have found 2,000 bodies.