The article covers the issues of initiative acquisition of archives in the documents of personal origin during the Great Patriotic War, the organization of work to identify and collect the wartime documents. Collecting documents of ordinary citizens, in particular letters from the front and to the front is analyzed. Proposals to create the specialized archives of documents on the history of the war were never implemented. Quite a lot of the actions, search operations and expeditions were conducted in the country, for example, the “Chronicle of the Great Patriotic War”, the “Frontline letter”, the “Search”, the “Memory”, etc., during which a significant number of documents of war participants and home front workers were collected and stored. Not so much of the documents of personal origin of the war participants are concentrated in the archives. In general, there prevails the collection type of organization for storing documents from the period of the Great Patriotic War. With reference to the corpus of documents of personal origin of the war period the research literature pays its attention mostly to correspondence and diaries, memoirs. Historians and archivists, analyzing wartime letters, offer different classifications depending on the authors, recipients, subjects, etc. The article provides a generalized classification of letters based on their inherent similarities. The author also analyzes the reasons for a small number of extant diaries and memoirs, and provides examples of their classification. Likewise the article describes current approaches to the collection of personal papers within the frames of the Moscow Glavarkhiv project “Moscow – with care for history” and the Ministry of Defense project “The Memory Road”.
