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Czarist Russia in color (1905–1915) (translate.google.com)
55 points by stefap2 on Aug 6, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments


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-...


From my stay and travels in Russia I can confirm that Russian hospitality is incredible. Plus they all have cats.


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.


I wouldn't say that. The clothes look uncomfortable, there are mud tracks rather than road, the whole city is two- or even one-story buildings (which implies you'd be living without any subcultural clubs in walking distance - hope you enjoy the same things everyone else does). Even the melons the guy is selling are clearly in much worse condition than modern supermarket produce. And look at how many people it takes just to operate one small fire engine or boat.

These are beautiful, fascinating pictures, but I wouldn't want to live there.


I live in Russia, and rural towns look pretty much as you just described. Of course, there's a lot of broken asphalt on the roads, and houses don't look as good as in the photos.


Yeah I don't know how people managed to live happy lives with all those mud tracks and sub-par melons.


If you look at happiness surveys, as best as we can tell such people would have been significantly less happy than we are.


Vodka.


It would be very cool to see photographs of the same places today. How much have the clothing and building styles changed? (or not changed)




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.


You forgot about the Decembrist revolt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decembrist_revolt


Yes I did, that was pretty important.



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 think its because they had to sit still for a long time while the photograph is taken.


I think it's because it's not natural to smile at a machine. Someone had to first notice that pictures would look better if people smiled, and then start telling everyone to smile until eventually the act of posing for a photograph entered the cultural consciousness.



Judging from the blurred children, the exposure times were probably on the order of a few seconds. Even if you wanted to, it's hard to hold a smile that long.


These were not taken with any form of "camera obscura".


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


So little litter. So little clutter in general.




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