Sounds and images of yore

Кубанские казаки
About two years ago during an episode of Zomergasten on Dutch television, they showed a fragment of a Soviet propaganda movie from the late 1940s. It was a very catchy song with people working hard and happily in the fields, harvesting grain to the benefit of the Soviet Union and the international socialist revolution. At random intervals since, I've been trying to get my hands on that fragment, and finally I struck lucky tonight. So from Кубанские казаки (Kubanskije kazaki), the 1949 movie by Иван Пырьев (Ivan Pyrjev), this is the song "Убирай! Загружай!" ("Ubiraj! Zagružaj!"):

Also note the rows and rows of combine harvesters. Later Stalinist propaganda, among other genres, would have them exchanged for all sorts of armoured vehicles.

Pre-SED recordings
James told me about a most interesting endeavour by the Germans during World War I. In their prisoner-of-war camps, they would go and record all sort of cultural events: songs, poetry, word lists... all on early grammophones. The recordings are currently being digitized at the Humboldt University in Berlin and some examples are available on their website. Under Tonbeispiele > Stimmen der Völker you can find songs in French and Malagasy (including a picture of the soldiers, presumably in French service), some Russian balalaika and mouth music, the parable of the Prodigal Son in Estonian, and a word list in Chuvash (a Turkic language spoken in the Ural Mountains).

Not on the Humboldt University website, but from that collection nonetheless, are the recordings of a prisoner of war from Alderley Edge, near Manchester, retelling the parable of the Prodigal Son. (This was possibly a set text for the German philological researchers.) People from the Manchester Museum have retrieved the fragments from Berlin, and they are available here.
The links include a transcription which is alright, even though it misses some of the instances of definite-article reduction, especially after words ending in an alveolar stop.
These recordings are now 90 years old, and a good 35 years older than the data from the Survey of English Dialects on which we base our ideas of traditional English dialects.
Although I suppose the language of the 1950s NORMs was more conservative than that of the 1918 soldier, given the apparent time hypothesis and even taking into account lifespan change. Still, they recordings are really old and very special indeed, so worth a listen.