Letters from prisoners of war of World War I as a channel of communication

Letters of prisoners of war represent an interesting and informative historical source on stories of military captivity of the First World War.The author provides the analysis of structure of this historical source in the work. Compares forms of letters of captured foreigners in theterritory of the Russian Empire (The Kazan province) and the Russian citizens in German and Austrian to captivity. Shows features of textualculture of letters of captured Russians and captured citizens of Germany and Austro-Hungary. Also in article the great attention is given tothe characteristic of degree of completeness and reliability of information transfer in connection with activity of censors. It is natural thatprisoners of war all ways tried to avoid censorship and developed ways and ways of enciphering of information that allowed them to handover under the pretext of innocent phrases important information from the vitalny point of view, and as an informal assessment of a mode ofcaptivity.In the first part of article the author argues on reliability of letters captured as information source, through a prism of a politicaldiscourse of a wartime. There were some points of view on how to perceive letters of captured Russians. One of them said that letters ofprisoners of war is a dodge of hostile intelligence services. Letters are written by specially trained people for the purpose of receiving moneyand provisions from relatives from Russia. It is natural that parcels don't reach addressees, and arrive in the order of the enemy. The authorargues that letters despite a set of complaints in their address, are an authentic and informative source.In the second part of work the author carries out external criticism of letters as source of a personal origin, allocates the mostcharacteristic (attributive) features allowing to confirm reliability of the letter and as to make its dating. The author specifies that structure ofletters captured approximately the identical. It is possible to allocate a number of elements: the initial protocol (An inskriptsiya, anintitulyatsiya, a salyutatsiya, an invokatsiya), the Narrative part of the letter (the description of life and transfer of greetings to relatives andfriends) and a finishing part of the letter (requests, dating, a korroboratsiya and an apprekatsiya).In the third part of work the author opens ways of a possible encryption of information by its transfer from captured home or fromrelatives and friends to the captured. As the main ways there was use of words in little-used languages and allegories. As a result the author,believes that information potential of letters captured still up to the end isn't opened. Also that this source can be successfully used with smallreservations in reconstruction of history of military captivity.

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