Jill Harness
100-Year-Old Color Photos of Pre-Revolution Russia
by Jill Harness - January 1, 2012 - 12:00 PM

Have you ever wondered what Russia looked like shortly before the revolution, but aren’t satisfied with black and white photos? Well then, you owe Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii a debt of thanks.

While color film was still years away from development, the chemist-turned-photojournalist developed his own solution to capture the vivid colors of his native home. Using color-filtered glass plates, he photographed a scene in red, then blue, then green and then put the images together to reveal a colorized portrait.

His amazing photographs, taken from 1909 to 1912 show what Russian life was like for everyone from peasants to noblemen before the country turned to communism.

Don’t miss the rest of the great images seen over at Flavorwire.

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Comments (16)

  1. That’s so many types of awesome! We’ll never hear the end of this from Star Trek’s Chekov (“Color photography
    is a Russian inwention!”)

    posted by Tim on 12-30-2011 at 10:58 am

  2. Thanks, Mental Floss, for another great find! Stuff like this is just so fun.

    posted by Rachel on 12-30-2011 at 12:03 pm

  3. The most annoying thing about Chekov’s accent is that Russian (and as far as I’m aware, all the Slavic languages (wasn’t he Czech?)) have a V sound, but don’t have a W. So “vessels” would come out correct, but “wine” wouldn’t.

    posted by Joshua on 12-30-2011 at 1:16 pm

  4. WOW! That is amazing! Great find!

    posted by M on 12-30-2011 at 1:54 pm

  5. Walter Koenig’s parents were Russian Jewish, specifically Lithuanian. Perhaps Lithuanian has the w sound.

    posted by Tim on 12-30-2011 at 2:32 pm

  6. Tim: i’m part german and they have words that begin with “w” such as Walter but when pronounced the sound is Valter. Just a thought.

    posted by izzi on 12-30-2011 at 3:39 pm

  7. Nope, according to the infallible Wikipedia, Lithuanian doesn’t have a W either.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_language#Consonants

    posted by Joshua on 12-30-2011 at 5:42 pm

  8. Another explanation for Koenig’s wonky accent is for comedic effect. I quote the infallible Wikipedia article on Koenig: Gene Roddenberry asked him to “ham up” his Russian accent to add a note of comic relief to the series. Chekov’s accent has been criticized as inauthentic, in particular Koenig’s substituting the ‘w’ sound in place of a ‘v’ sound (e.g, “wodka” for “vodka”). Koenig has said the accent was inspired by his father, who had the same difficulty with the ‘v’ sound.

    posted by Tim on 12-30-2011 at 6:09 pm

  9. Soooo…. speech impediment? Hilarious.

    posted by Joshua on 12-30-2011 at 6:26 pm

  10. Stunning,Gorgeous,Brilliant

    posted by William on 12-30-2011 at 11:21 pm

  11. I’ve been fascinated by this process for producing color pictures since I first heard of it several years ago. With today’s modern advantage of Photoshop, it’s surprisingly easy and effective to build a Trichrome color picture. Click on my name to see one example of a Trichrome that I made recently.

    posted by Dave on 1-1-2012 at 6:12 am

  12. @Dave Nice! I love Gorskii’s work. I’ve been known to spend hours clicking through the images on the Library of Congress page and finally broke down and bought a coffee table book of his work from Amazon that was printed in the 80s.

    posted by Angela on 1-1-2012 at 5:30 pm

  13. “Inwention” is a typical mistake in transliteration that can also be heard in Indian accents. It is similar to how someone would spell “view” as “wiev.”

    posted by Me on 1-1-2012 at 6:06 pm

  14. @Joshua: Speech impediments are a Russian inwention!

    posted by Tim on 1-2-2012 at 11:44 am

  15. Sometimes I wish there was a ‘like’ button for the comments! ;)

    posted by ann on 1-4-2012 at 5:04 pm

  16. What year does Star Trek occur? Allegedly, what 3-400 yrs in the future? Who’s to say an accent and pronunication wouldn’t change some in that time? I.e. our english compared to KJV english.

    posted by Dave Alan on 1-5-2012 at 1:29 pm

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