The Great Patriotic War disrupted the usual course of life, separated loved ones for a long time and put them in the most difficult conditions. Among the documents of the war years, front-line letters are rather special artifacts.

This letter was kept in the family of Serafima Vladimirovna Krivtsova for more than 60 years. During the war she was a child, but she remembered well how much joy this letter brought to her when in July 1941 her aunt Tatiana received it from her husband Oleg.

As a “gift from the front, ” the sender enclosed a touching herbarium of wildflowers into the letter folded in a triangle. He probably plucked them on the platform of one of the railway stations en route to the front line. This was his first and last letter from the front: a few days later the Red Army soldier was killed, and a month later his relatives received the death notice. Today, these wildflowers are a kind of monument to the unfulfilled dreams and hopes of a whole generation of the Soviet people, whose lives were scorched by the flames of war.

Letters from the front — front triangles — were one of the few means of communication with relatives and friends for soldiers and officers during the bloody war. They were often written in pencil, and less often — in ink, as it was difficult to find at the front.

In hospitals, nurses wrote letters on behalf of the wounded; on the front line, soldiers sometimes asked those who were more literate and had a neat handwriting to write letters for them. Such triangles did not need a stamp or delivery payment, so instead of using envelopes, sheets were simply folded so that the text was inside. In addition, compactly folded paper did not crumble as much and did not unfold in the bag of the postman, who often had to rush literally into the line of fire.

This valuable exhibit — the front line letter — was given to the museum in 2010 by Olga Dedeneva, a student of Belgorod secondary school No. 28, the granddaughter of Serafima Vladimirovna Krivtsova, as part of the regional competition “Military Relic” dedicated to the 65th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War.