Russian Empire in the Early 20th Century: Spectacular Color Photos Reveal a World Lost to History

Before the Russian Revolution tore the old world apart, one man set out to photograph it in full color. Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian chemist and photographer who developed a method for capturing color images at a time when most photography was still black and white. Between 1909 and 1915, with the direct backing of Tsar Nicholas II, he traveled across the vast Russian Empire in a specially outfitted railroad-car darkroom. His mission was to document the Empire in all its variety — its people, its landscapes, its churches, and its growing industrial power.

His technique was ingenious for the era. He exposed a single tall glass plate three times in rapid succession, each time through a different color filter — red, green, and blue. The three resulting images were then projected through separate lenses, layered on top of each other, to produce a single full-color image. It was a precise and demanding process, but it worked. Over his years of travel, Prokudin-Gorsky produced more than 2,000 color images across the Empire.

The Russian Empire in the early 1900s was a world of sharp contrasts. Ancient Orthodox monasteries stood alongside new factories. Peasants worked the land in ways that had barely changed for centuries, while engineers oversaw railroad construction stretching across thousands of miles. Prokudin-Gorsky recorded all of it. He traveled to the Ural Mountains, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Volga River basin, and the far northwest. The breadth of his archive is staggering.

His portraits are among the most striking images in the collection. He photographed people from nearly every corner of the Empire — Bashkirs, Georgians, Dagestanis, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Armenians, and Russians from city and countryside alike. These weren’t distant, blurry snapshots. The color brought each face into vivid proximity, making subjects feel present across more than a century.

Cities like Perm, Rybinsk, and Zlatoust appear in the photographs as functioning, living places — not ruins or relics. Perm, a major industrial city near the Ural Mountains, shows the scale of Russia’s eastern development. Rybinsk, on the Volga, was a key river trading hub. These images give us a ground-level view of urban Russia before war and revolution reshaped everything.

The industrial scope of Prokudin-Gorsky’s project was not accidental. The Tsar wanted a record of Russia’s modernization, and the photographer delivered. He captured mines, iron works, cotton mills, railroad bridges, and dam construction sites. At the Kasli Iron Works in the Urals, he photographed the casting of artistic metalwork — a craft the region was known for across Europe. At the Bakalskii mine, workers appear amid the machinery and raw landscape of extraction.

The Trans-Siberian Railroad was one of the defining engineering achievements of the era. Running thousands of miles across the continent, it connected Moscow to the Russian Far East and was still expanding when Prokudin-Gorsky traveled alongside it. He photographed workers, bridges, and operators along its route, including a switch operator near the town of Ust Katav on the Yuryuzan River.

Central Asia presented a completely different face of the Empire. In Bukhara and Samarkand — ancient Silk Road cities that had been absorbed into Russian control in the 1860s and 1870s — Prokudin-Gorsky photographed bakeries, merchants, mosques, and the everyday life of people living under Russian imperial rule. The Emir of Bukhara, Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, sat for a formal portrait. So did Isfandiyar Khan, ruler of the Russian protectorate of Khorezm.

One of the most famous portraits from the entire archive is that of Leo Tolstoy, photographed at his estate of Yasnaya Polyana in 1908. Tolstoy was already 80 years old and among the most recognized people in the world. Prokudin-Gorsky captured him in color, a detail that makes the image unusually immediate — the great writer photographed not as a gray historical ghost but as a living, aging man in a green coat.

Dam and waterway infrastructure was another major focus. Workers and supervisors appear in photographs taken during the construction of a dam across the Oka River near Beloomut in Ryazan Governorate. The project was designed by engineer Nestor Puzyrevsky, who also appears in the collection. These photographs functioned as both documentation and propaganda for Russian industrial progress.

The Caucasus region gave Prokudin-Gorsky some of his most visually dramatic material. He photographed the resort town of Borjomi in Georgia, the city of Sukhumi in Abkhazia overlooking its bay, and the town of Artvin — then part of the Russian Empire, now located in Turkey. He also took a self-portrait on the banks of the Karolitskhali River in the Caucasus Mountains, seated in a suit and hat against the rushing water.

Religious architecture formed a significant thread throughout the archive. Prokudin-Gorsky photographed Orthodox churches, monasteries, and cathedrals across Russia — from the remote Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea to the Savior-Yakovlevsky Monastery in Rostov. Many of these structures were later destroyed or severely damaged during the Bolshevik Revolution and the anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet era that followed. His photographs remain the clearest color record of what they looked like.

The range of human subjects in the archive is extraordinary. Prokudin-Gorsky photographed prisoners in Bukhara still in shackles. He photographed paupers in Samarkand. He photographed a Sart woman in purdah, a mullah with his female students near a mosque in Artvin, and Jewish children gathered with their teacher. These photographs do not look away from the harder realities of life under the Empire.

Rural life across Russia appears frequently. Peasant girls in Topornya, haymakers pausing near the Mariinsky Canal, a shepherd boy on the Sim River in the Urals, and a woman spinning yarn in the village of Izvedovo — these images document a way of life that was largely unchanged from the previous century and would be dramatically disrupted within a decade.

The far northwest of the Empire — Karelia, Olonets Governorate, and the shores of Lake Onega and Lake Seliger — appears in several photographs. Prokudin-Gorsky even photographed himself riding a handcar along the Murmansk railway outside Petrozavodsk. These northern regions had their own distinct character: forested, lake-dotted, and dotted with ancient wooden churches and Orthodox monasteries sitting close to the water.

Across the Caucasus, Prokudin-Gorsky photographed people dressed in regional costumes. An Armenian woman posed for him on a hillside near Artvin. A Georgian woman stood for a portrait. Women from Dagestan appear together in another photograph. These weren’t incidental snapshots — he was deliberately building a visual record of the Empire’s ethnic and cultural diversity at the Tsar’s direction.

Some of Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs are straightforward scenic views — a waterfront wharf, a river bend, a panorama of Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia) taken from the grounds of Saint David Church. Others are technical studies of machinery: alternators made in Budapest running a hydroelectric station in Turkmenistan, looms inside a cotton textile mill in Tashkent. Taken together, they make up an unmatched cross-section of a continent-spanning empire.

After Prokudin-Gorsky’s death, most of his glass plate negatives ended up at the US Library of Congress. Since 2000, the Library has digitized them and combined the three-color exposures digitally to reconstruct the original full-color images. The results give us hundreds of photographs of Russia and its neighbors — landscapes, people, buildings, and industries — rendered in color from over a century ago.