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

Between 1907 and 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii rode through even restricted parts of prerevolutionary Russia in his specially fitted darkroom 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.

After the tsar was murdered in 1918, Prokudin-Gorskii fled Russia with 22 crates of glass plates and eventually settled in France, where he died 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.

Photos: Prokudin-Gorskii?s Color Photos of Russia, 1907-1915 - Newsweek

More info and photos here: The Empire That Was Russia: The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated (A Library of Congress Exhibition)

I actually like old photos - give the sense of history. But still: This is AMAZING! Thanks for sharing...

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agreed......

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....attached to sanity by a bungee cord.....

That's insane. It looks so much less depressing in colour.

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