Remarkable find. Some striking items: occasionally seen , especially in the earlier minutes , are some well and fashionably dressed (seemingly) middle, almost upper-middle class women. More than I would have expected, and not greartly different from what you might expect to find touring a British country home.
There is also a modest, but unmistakable military presence, with uniformed soldiers amidst the crowd.
Still, the palaces and grounds appear welll-maintained and in good shape.
But I can't help remembering that at this exact moment, in the Ukraine and in southern USSR generally, Stalin's forced collectivization of the peasantry was in full-swing . Anyone working the land with a status above stable hand was being threatened, having taxes-in-kind demanded (i.e., his livestock and grain and seed reserves extorted) , subjected to the 'conveyor' form of near round-the-clock interrogations and brow-beatings, and in general being pressured to join the kolkhoz and relinquish his own bit of land, however modest.
In short, while it was literally a day in the park at Peterhof for the urban folks, life in the grainbelts of the USSR was breaking down, and this was BEFORE the terror famine of 1932-33.!
But then again, maybe the park and palace visitors looked reasonably healthy because they were being fed with grain, pork, vegetables and poultry flowing, however wastefully and inefficiently, from the soon-to-be -liquidated ku;aks and peasants of the Ukrainian 'farm belt.'
But back to this film clip. I can see why the Soviet gov't would want this former tsarist idyll-turned proletariatian holiday grounds filmed. It does put a pretty face on the larger ugly but truer picture of early 1930s Soviet Russia.
