Before the Revolution
December 10, 2010
Young women offer berries to visitors to their traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River, near the town of Kirillov, in 1909.
SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH PROKUDIN-GORSKII, an innovator in color photography, documented pre-Revolutionary Russia from 1909 to 1915. In thousands of vivid photographs, Prokudin-Gorski captured a world on the eve of World War I and the Revolution. He recorded monasteries, children at play, women in peasant dress, machine rooms in factories, mines, dams, wildflowers in bloom and views of cities and villages. He traveled throughout an empire that stretched 7,000 miles from West to East in a railcar with its own darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II. Half of his collection was confiscated by authorities before he fled to France in 1918 and the rest are owned by the Library of Congress, which offers easy access to them online. They provide a fascinating look at a lost world.
