Special places archive

The empire that was Russia

Here are photographs of the Russian empire in 1909-1915 by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. These are colour pictures, each made with three successive filtered exposures on monochrome glass plates. The plates have recently been scanned and the colour images digitally reconstructed.

As the introduction to this Library of Congress exhibition says, the subjects ranged from the medieval churches and monasteries of old Russia, to the railroads and factories of an emerging industrial power, to the daily life and work of Russia’s diverse population.