100-Year-Old Russian Photos in Full Color

Though some may have seen these before, I think this collection is an important piece of history and art. Two of my favorite subjects. And for those of you who have not seen these before- prepare to be fascinated. Just keep in mind that they were taken a CENTURY ago! To me, it is incredible and invaluable to have a clear glimpse of life such a long way back. Enjoy!

Saint Nil Stolbenskii Monastery, Lake Seliger, 1910.

The twilight of the empire was a time of transition in Russia. With industrialization, class lines were starting to blut, and dissatisfaction with the czar was spreading. Capturing the ethos of that moment was Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, whom Czar Nicholas II had named as the royal photographer during his final decade on the throne.

Wooden mills using wind-power to grind wheat and rye on the vast Siberian plain, 1912.

Between 1905 and 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii rode through even restricted parts of pre-revolutionary Russia in his specially fitted dark-room rail car, shooting color photos (a technology still in its infancy) by a method of his own invention. He took three consecutive photographs of his subjects with three separate filters–red, green, and blue–and then combined them into full-color projections, thereby capturing a huge range of architecture, infrastructure, and people.

Young women offer berries to visitors in an area along the Sheksna River, 1909.

After the czar was murdered in 1918, Prokudin-Gorskii fled Russia with 22 crates of glass plates and eventually settled in France, where he dies in 1944. The Library of Congress bought his plates shortly after his death, but it wasn’t until the advent of digital imaging that it could restore them, a process finished in 2001 and exhibited online here.

The only known color photo of Leo Tolstoy, circa 1908.

An elderly Sart man in the reigon of Samarkand, in modern Uzbekistan, circa 1905-1915.

A metal truss bridge over the Kama River–for the Trans-Siberian railroad–that still connects hundreds of big and small cities of the European and Asian parts of Russia, 1910.

The Kasli Iron Works located in the heart of the Ural Mountains, 1910.

A Dagestani man and woman, the region is the North Caucasus mountains at the southernmost part of Russia, circa 1905 – 1915.

Workers at the Bakalskii mine, in the iron rich Ural Mountains, near the city of Ekaterinburg, 1910.

The Trinity Cathedral in the city of Ialutorvosk, a small dog is visible in the foreground, 1912.

Jewish children with a teacher in Samarkand, circa 1905 – 1915

Church of Resurrection in the Grove, Kostroma, 1910.

The Emir of Bukhara in 1911, shortly after his accession.

Shakh-i Zindeh mosque in Samarkand, circa 1905 – 1915.

Workers and supervisors work on a dam across the Oka River southeast of Moscow, 1912.

Self portrait of the artist on the Karolitskhali River, near Batumi, Georgia circa 1915.

Pretty incredible, right? Let me know what you think! To see more photos visit (also the source of text and images): Newsweek

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Tagged as: Lake Seliger, Nicholas II of Russia, Russia, Samarkand, Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Sheksna River, Siberia, Ural Mountains