Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday ordered the Defense Ministry to publish all of Russia's World War II archives on the Internet by 2013.
"The Defense Ministry is already working on this and a relatively small but significant part of the 230,000 field reports and 30 million award citations have already been posted on the Podvig naroda [People's Heroic Deeds] website," he said.
He said almost 1.5 million people had already visited the site, which is "proof of the high interest in the documents."
"The digitization of this section of our war archives should be completed by the end of 2012," he said.
Over 100 million sheets of documents weighing a total of 400 tons are still to be processed and digitized.
Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said declassification work on the war archives had been ongoing since 2007.
MOSCOW, May 21 (RIA Novosti)
