British Pathé has uploaded
3,500 hours of newsreel footage to YouTube, a great gift to
anyone who enjoys exploring history. Amid this wealth of clips is a
jaw-dropping 1939 dispatch
from a Tatar collective farm in Crimea. In this village, the
narrator informed English theatergoers, the work is “pleasant and
profitable,” “light and speedy.” The grown-ups play music, the
little children dance, and “All the workers, men and women, are
part owners of the farm, which may account for the happy
smiles”:
The report neglects to mention it—perhaps the filmmakers simply
did not have time, what with all the joyful folk-dancing footage
they needed to squeeze in—but the collectivization of agriculture
in that region was a brutal process that killed millions of people. And
evidently the workers’ ownership of the farm wasn’t very secure,
given that five years later Stalin managed to expel
the Tatars from Crimea. Still: Just look at those happy
smiles!
Bonus links: For more Pathé reports from the Ukraine,
go
here. For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.
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