Human losses of the Samara Region during the World War I (1914–1918)

The paper considers the problem of human losses of the Samara province during the World War I for the first time. The author uses the documents posted on the electronic portal «Memory of the Heroes of the Great War of 1914–1918», a unique information resource that is the first official bank of original documents of the state and departmental archives of Russia about the participants and events of the World War I. Special attention in this work is paid to irretrievable human losses, as the most severe and irreparable. It is established that the archival materials contain 258,686 records of various types of losses among conscripts from the Samara province, 49,015 of them speak of the dead, those who died of wounds and missing. They accounted for 13% of the total losses of the region. It is revealed that the data bank makes it possible to detail the human damage by cities, counties, volosts of the province, the cause, date and place of death, military rank and participation in strategic operations. The author has concluded that a number of the obtained parameters are related to the specifics of accounting for human losses during the studied period, but the knowledge obtained makes it possible to assess the scale of the demographic catastrophe that shook the country and the province during the World War I.