That once-lost soldier

The author steps into the past with a BBC documentary on World War II about a unique quest to trace four million Russian soldiers who went missing in action

Deep in a forest, 80 km from St Petersburg - or what was once Leningrad - a group of men and women search for something. Inch by inch, they scan the forest, gently prodding the damp soil. They have been at it for months, often fiddling around for 10 hours a day. The forest finally relents. One of the youngest members of the search team, 13-year-old Vadim Kytishev, shouts out that he has spotted a boot. Getting down on his knees, he digs some more and then declares: "I found a soldier!"

The skeletal remains the boy has found are of a Russian soldier, one of the four million who went missing in action during World War II and whose fate has remained unknown for 70 years. That is until a group of volunteers, ordinary Russians, young and not-so-young, coming from different walks of life, took it upon themselves to find the remains of these missing soldiers and restore their identities and memories to their loved ones.

The poignant story of this search by several such dedicated groups of people, who simply call them "diggers", will be told through a documentary, Burying the Past by Olga Ivshina, on BBC World this weekend. In a note about the painstakingly created documentary, which also carries archival shots of the war, Ivshina writes, "When you sit in front of a laptop in a big and modern Russian city like Moscow or St Petersburg, it is almost impossible to believe that lying somewhere in the surrounding countryside there are hundreds of unburied soldiers surrounded by unexploded mines and shells." This is not a figment of her imagination. The volunteers have found remains even in people's backyards.

After the devastating war, as a ravaged Russia put all its resources to rebuild itself, the soldiers who had disappeared fighting the Germans were the least of its priorities. Or so it appears through the documentary. And so the volunteers believe. Many of them say the Russian authorities intentionally planted trees on what were battlefields to wipe out all traces of the war, including the remains of the soldiers. The diggers have sometimes had to uproot trees to get to the soldiers.

Ivshina's camera follows several such teams of diggers, some of whom have been on this quest for over three decades, through different parts of Russia. One such team, called Shlisselburg, has been active in the Caucasus Mountains ever since the melting glaciers started revealing long-concealed grenades, ammunition and soldiers. In one year alone, the team found 50 bodies.

The task of the volunteers, who have the government's authorisation to dig but whose initiative is funded by themselves or through grants, doesn't end after they have retrieved a soldier's remains. The next tough task is to return the soldier's identity to him. The bones reveal part it, telling whether the soldier was a boy of 16 or 17 or a mature man, or whether he was a tall person or a small, frail individual.

Apart from this, every soldier found is geo tagged, photographed and logged. Each soldier was required to carry an ID with his name, names of relatives and their contact numbers in an ebony box. But the documentary, through interviews with historians, a World War II veteran and a defence ministry personnel, explains how the soldiers did not fill the ID form because of a superstition that if they did, they would get killed. And how, time has erased the words of even the ones who did fill in these details. And how, the volunteers are trying to bring back those words "from the mist of time". For the relatives too, whom the volunteers contact them with news of their long lost relative's retrieval, it's like taking a journey back in time to know the person they might have only heard of from their mothers, grandmothers, fathers or grandfathers. As the soldiers are finally given an honourable burial, the unrecognisable skeletal remains take on a flesh and blood form. The portraits on their coffins tell the stories of lives lived, lost and finally found.

It's a grim documentary. Yet, it's full of hope. The past has given purpose to the present. Some of the volunteers are those who lived on the street; some dealt with drunkard parents. Today, many of them are productively engaged individuals, with jobs and families. Digging the past, as though, has given them a future. The humaneness of these ordinary people who are risking their lives for those long gone is phenomenal. At least 10 volunteers have lost their lives in the search as dormant grenades, some in the pockets of the soldiers, went off. But undeterred, the volunteers pledge to carry on till they find the last soldier "missing in action". Burying the Past will be aired on BBC World News

on January 4 at 6.40 am and 8.40 pm, and
on January 5 at 2.40 pm