Overview

In 1929, Dziga Vertov shot the revolutionary film “Donbass Symphony”. Churches are destroyed amid applause, crosses and domes toppled, icons burned. Flags are hoisted. High-voltage pylons instead of crosses, coal mines, steelworks, dynamically assembled. The new faith is directed at the visible and is ingeniously and passionately established with all the means of the new art of film. It is the first Soviet sound film, a masterpiece and a classic. But the Donbass, the much-sung Soviet myth, is a British creation, namely that of the Welshman John Hughes, who arrived in 1870 with over 100 British engineers and a concession from the Tsar, developed the coal deposits and built up the steel industry in the Donetsk Basin.