Everyday life of the base hospital at the final stage of the Great Patriotic War (by the example of complaints of the wounded and sick Red Army soldiers) 

Ivan N. Inozemtsev, Postgraduate student, assistant of the sub-department of history of Russia and methods of teaching history, director of the Museum of the history of pedagogical education, Penza State University (40 Krasnaya street, Penza, Russia), E-mail: Kerskij@mail.ru 

Background. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to obtain qualitatively new and diverse knowledge that contributes to the formation of an objective assessment of the activities of health authorities and institutions during the war period. The purpose of the study is to reconstruct the hospital everyday life of Penza region at the final stage of the Great Patriotic War based on the complaints from wounded Red Army soldiers. Materials and methods. The study is based on the analysis of documents from the State Archives of Penza Region, as well as materials from local and central periodicals. The central place is occupied by the complaints of servicemen who were treated in evacua-tion hospitals of the Penza region in 1944–1945. Documents of an earlier period (for 1941–1943) and any statistical data on the number and problems of appeals in the regional archive are not presented. The analysis of the specified corpus of sources makes it possible to reconstruct the daily history of evacuation hospitals in the “dimension” of direct recipi-ents of medical care – wounded soldiers of the Red Army. The description of the adaptation practices of the wounded and sick, presented in the complaints, needs to be correlated with the assessments of employees of hospitals, public organizations and government agencies. Results. Some aspects of the source analysis of the complaints of the wounded and sick Red Army soldiers are studied, their main problems are highlighted. An attempt was made to determine the degree of reliability of perceptions of hospital life reproduced in complaints. Conclusions. The analysis made it possible to identify a wide range of problems faced by the wounded who were treated in local evacuation hospitals: poorquality nutrition, low level of material and sanitary support, theft of property, shortcomings in the organization of treatment, violations of military and labor discipline. Conducting a comparative analysis of the information obtained from a significant number of complaints with the data of office documentation allows us to judge a fairly adequate reflection of the extreme everyday life of base hospital in the messages of the wounded. 

military everyday life of the base regions, Penza region, evacuation hospitals, complaints, wounded and sick Red Army soldiers 

Inozemtsev I.N. Everyday life of the base hospital at the final stage of the Great Patriotic War (by the example of complaints of the wounded and sick Red Army soldiers). Izvestiya vysshikh uchebnykh zavedeniy. Povolzhskiy region. Gumanitarnye nauki = University proceedings. Volga region. Humanities. 2022;(1):68–78. (In Russ.). doi:10.21685/ 2072-3024-2022-1-6