Czarist Russia in color (1905–1915)

Here's a bit on the photographer and the specific technique used to capture these photos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#Photogr...

When I was younger, in the early 90s, I had a chance to be on one of the earliest U.S.-Russian student exchanges following the fall of the Soviet Union. I spent a summer there, mostly in the Urals, but a bit East of those mountains as well, sometimes out in open steppe areas.

If somebody asked me what my top 2 memories of that trip were I'd probably narrow down a great number of memorable moments into these two things:

- The incredible warmth and hospitality of the Russian people and our host families.

- The blue enormity of the Russian sky. I've never seen it captured quite right in pictures until the first time I saw Gorsky's photos.

I learned later that Russian recognizes two different kinds of blue as base colors in the language: синий (what most languages call "blue") and голубой or what in English we call "light blue". Being surrounded by that sky all the time, it's no wonder.

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full

http://blog.properrussian.com/2011/05/what-colors-are-there-...

What's most awesome about these pictures, is that looking many of them, you could easily imagine they were taken today. It's astonishing that the picture of modern life we see all around us, we build up this idea in our heads that we've come so far in the past hundred or so years, but in reality, much of the world - even in the West, hasn't come that far at all.

The whole collection is here: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/?loclr=flik

Russia's Tzars really doomed Russia for the last hundred years + the future when they decided to wait a century or more too long to emancipate their serfs. Russians have never had a chance to experience freedom, just corruption and authoritarianism because their nobles couldn't do the right thing when almost everywhere else in Europe there was enlightenment among the higher classes. Russia also never had a French revolution or a Magna Carter. They had a failed Streltsy rebellion during Peter the Great and then 300 years later the Tsar just drops the mic, walks away resulting in the assassination of his entire family.

I think it might be the same as this from 2010:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_c...

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621517

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491766

Life from 100 years ago seems so much more real in color. We are so conditioned to color photos that B&W seems unreal. I bet the majority of the people in those pictures were never photographed again.

Too many not-russian nations. Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, Georgia, Dagestan - they aren't russians. So photos with their national wears shouldn't be signed as 'Russia'.

Ever venture to the colorized history subreddit? http://www.reddit.com/r/colorizedhistory

Beware - this site throws up 40 or 50 cookies. If you have cookie security turned on with Firefox, you have to abort Firefox in Task Manager.

Pet peeve: I want to zoom out with my browser, but all the images are set to width:100% in a taller aspect-ratio...

Notice how hardly anyone is smiling at that thing named a camera obscura.

I show them to a friend and expected they are from the '90...

So little litter. So little clutter in general.