A reburial ceremony for Red Army soldiers will be held in Vitebsk
On December 5, 2014, at 12:00 PM, a memorial service and reburial ceremony for Red Army soldiers who died during the liberation of Vitebsk in 1944 will be held at the military cemetery on Titov Street in Vitebsk. The remains of 23 soldiers in two burials were discovered in the autumn of 2014 in the Pervomaisky District of the regional center.
On September 11, 2014, during search operations at an unregistered military burial site on Beshenkovichi Highway (near the intersection with the Dobreyka River), the 52nd Separate Specialized Search Battalion of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Belarus discovered the remains of one unidentified Red Army soldier (belonging was determined by the remnants of uniform and shell casings found in the grave). The discovered remains were sent for additional examination to Minsk, which confirmed that the burial dates back to the Great Patriotic War period.
On October 9, 2014, during excavation work in the area of the Fur Factory (2nd Pribrezhnaya Street), numerous human bone remains were discovered by workers of Shumilino PMU. Based on the information received, the Vitebsk City Executive Committee's decision of October 13, 2014, “On conducting search operations with excavations at the site” № 1338 was prepared to carry out search and exhumation works, which allowed the 52nd Separate Specialized Search Battalion of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Belarus to conduct excavations at the site of discovery of the remains from October 20 to 24, 2014. The results of the search operations are documented in the Act on the Completion of Search Operations at Search Object 72 PD dated October 27, 2014.
During the search operations, the remains of 22 Red Army soldiers who died during the liberation of the city of Vitebsk from the Nazi invaders were discovered. Their military affiliation and time of burial were determined based on individual items found in the burial site (47 shell casings from Soviet weapons (some of which were adopted during the war), 2 bullets, 3 belt fragments, a buckle from equipment, a pencil fragment, a fragment of a "Maxim" machine gun belt).
Part of the skeletal remains were sent by the Investigative Committee to Minsk for forensic examination, which confirmed that the found remains belonged to the period of the Great Patriotic War. Currently, the main part of the remains of the 22 Soviet soldiers found near the Fur Combine are held at the Department of Ideological Work, Culture, and Youth Affairs of the Vitebsk City Executive Committee (transferred by the act of transfer of the deceased's remains dated October 27, 2014). The remaining bone fragments, which were sent for examination to Minsk, were handed over by employees of the Investigative Committee to the Vitebsk Specialized Civil Service Combine on November 11, 2014, for temporary storage and subsequent reburial.
In execution of the decision of the Vitebsk City Executive Committee "On conducting search operations with excavations at the site" dated September 4, 2014, No. 1199, the discovered remains of 23 Red Army soldiers will be solemnly reburied on December 5, 2014, at the military cemetery on Titov Street in Vitebsk. As this military memorial is a historical and cultural value, permission was obtained from the Ministry of Culture to carry out reburial work at the site.
It is not possible to establish the names of the deceased. During the exhumation of the remains, no items were found that would allow for the identification of the deceased. There is no information about burial sites in historical sources, nor in the electronic databases of the OBD "Memorial".
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