This article describes genre-forming features of informative documentary texts of military discourse, such as communicative goal, author's image, addressee's image, event content, factor of the future, and factor of the past. The following terms are studied here: documentary text, speech genre, and informative speech genres. The documentary text is considered as a kind of а speech genre, realized in writing. In the course of the research, the most frequent informative documents of military

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... urse (Great Patriotic War period) were selected, i.e. summary, dispatch, and report. Having analysed the definitions of the abovementioned speech genres and the corresponding documentary texts, the author was able to determine their communicative goals, single out the main (inform) and additional (ask, suggest) genre-forming intentions. It was revealed that the speech addressee in informative speech genres can be both an executive officer and a group of persons, information about them (detailed or not) being presented in the initial and final formulas of the document. The author's image in the main texts of documents is either implicit or manifested with the help of performative verbs. The speech addressee is abstract and is only indicated in the initial formula of the document, in most cases by the person's position. Informative documents should meet the following requirements: impersonal and multi-event nature, presentation of the informative component by events of the past and the present, creation of a futural perspective in texts with incentive intentions. The analysis of the factor of the past showed that the summary and the analytical report are initiative genres of written communication, while the dispatch and the operations report are reactive speech genres. Having studied the factor of the future parameter, the author concluded that informative speech genres underlie other informative and directive genres. For instance, dispatches and reports are created on the basis of summaries, whose main intention is to inform. The texts of dispatches and reports, having additional intentions of asking and suggesting, form the basis for directive documentary texts.