OBD Memorial is a project by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation to scan and make available online data on all Soviet

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 personnel who were killed or were missing in action

Missing in action

Missing in action is a casualty Category assigned under the Status of Missing to armed services personnel who are reported missing during active service. They may have been killed, wounded, become a prisoner of war, or deserted. If deceased, neither their remains nor grave can be positively...

 during the Second World War

Eastern Front (World War II)

The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of World War II between the European Axis powers and co-belligerent Finland against the Soviet Union, Poland, and some other Allies which encompassed Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945...

 and afterwards.

The project was launched in November 2006 and the online database

Online database

An online database is a database accessible from a network, including from the Internet.It differs from a local database, held in an individual computer or its attached storage, such as a CD....

 was opened for the public access on March 31, 2007. The main sources of information are funds of the Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defence

Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defence

The Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defence is located in Podolsk, just south of the city of Moscow.As a departmental archive of Russia, it stores documents of different staffs and offices, associations and formations, units, institutions and military academies of the Soviet Defence...

 (TsAMO) and funds of Military-Memorial Center of the Armed Forces of Russia, including declassified

Declassification

Declassification is the process of documents that formerly were classified as secret ceasing to be so restricted, often under the principle of freedom of information. Procedures for declassification vary by country...

 ones. Of those TsAMO documents, ones related to Soviet prisoners of war

Prisoner of war

A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...

 are documents originated from Germany, and they are scanned as a part of a German-Russian project named Soviet Prisoners of War, that is funded by the government of Germany. Additional sources are the digital version of Book of Memory for Arkhangelsk Oblast

Arkhangelsk Oblast

Arkhangelsk Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . It includes the Arctic archipelagos of Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya, as well as the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea....

; printed Books of Memory for Kaliningrad Oblast

Kaliningrad Oblast

Kaliningrad Oblast is a federal subject of Russia situated on the Baltic coast. It has a population of The oblast forms the westernmost part of the Russian Federation, but it has no land connection to the rest of Russia. Since its creation it has been an exclave of the Russian SFSR and then the...

 and Kaluga Oblast

Kaluga Oblast

Kaluga Oblast is a federal subject of Russia . Its administrative center is the city of Kaluga.-Geography:Kaluga Oblast is located in the central part of the East European Plain. The Smolensk Highland lays in the western and north-western part of the oblast, while the Central Russian Highland -...

(19 volumes). Physically scanning work is performed by the Center for Scanning and Retroconversion 'Electronic Archive'. The Union of Search Detachments of Russia also participates in the project.

As of December 19, 2007 9,372,000 sheets of documents with 18,900,000 entries were scanned and made available online.