Exactly. And this is why a whole dimension of collecting rare footages is quite dead now. This is why piracy through these great public trackers still matters.

Rare movies and film documentaries from the 20th century still can be found on rutracker, for example. The Russians really did create a dedicated community of archivists, with the quality varying to a certain degree depending on the uploader's reputation, but they certainly created a notorious collection of movies, even the ones relatively unknown or sometimes censored to death on western countries.