The article examines the role and participation of the districts of the Moscow region in the replenishment of the Moscow divisions of the people’s militia in the summer of 1941, primarily based on materials from the Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War of the USSR Academy of Sciences. This Commission functioned from 1941 to 1945 and was led by corresponding member and later academician Isaac Izrailevich Mints. These sources are, first of all, transcripts of conversations with militiamen and materials from district committees of the VKP(b), district executive committees and military registration offices. They make it possible to identify the features of the formation of the people’s militia in the Moscow region and the contribution of individual regions of the Moscow region. Summary data is provided on the creation of a militia in a particular area of the Moscow region and on which particular Moscow division its units joined. The principles of recruiting militia formations of the Moscow region («voluntary mobilization» and the production-territorial approach to recruitment), the socio-demographic composition, and sentiments of the militiamen are analyzed. It is shown that it was the Moscow region that replenished the Moscow militia divisions, which were relatively homogeneous in social composition, with a peasant element. Volunteer formations from the regions of the Moscow region, especially from its industrial centers, were a significant contributor to the recruitment of Moscow divisions and contributed to the cumulative efforts of the militimen to contain the German army in the Moscow Battle.
The Great Patriotic War; people’s militia; mobilization; recruitment of military units; the Mints Commission.