Authors

Iaroslav Golubinov¹;  ¹ SAMARA NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY, Russian Federation

Discussion

In 1914, the border areas of three empires (Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary) turned into a war zone, where tens of millions of people lived and died every day. In addition to the economic effect, the presence of armies negatively affected the state of the environment in the front-line zone. Soldiers cut down forests, burned, dismantled and destroyed houses and outbuildings, killed wild and domestic animals, trampled crops. During the construction of their fortifications, armies drained or, conversely, flooded the battle area, laid roads, dug trenches, built fortified posts, dugouts, barracks, hospitals, etc. All such activities were accompanied by littering of the territory. In addition, during the fighting, the armies also left a lot of garbage and waste: the corpses of animals and people, used and unused ammunition, broken weapons, waste from medical operations (bandages, bottles, syringes, etc.). All of this either remained on the battlefield, becoming part of a unique front-line environment or being picked up and processed by military personnel or civilians allowed to do this. So, such activity became a part of the system of occupation and exploitation of the non-combatants. The paper's purpose is to highlight the features of the creation and disposal of garbage on the Eastern Front of the First World War, based on a wide range of military documents (orders and reports) and ego-documents (diaries, memoirs and letters of combatants).