The Empire that was Russia

The photography of

Prokudin Gorskii

The Russia of Nicholas II on the eve of World War I was a land of striking ethnic diversity. Comprising all of the republics of what later was to become the Soviet Union, as well as present-day Finland and much of Poland, Russia was home to more than 150 million people--of which only about half were ethnic Russians. In his travels throughout the empire, Prokudin-Gorskii captured this diversity. His colour photographs of peasants from rural Russia, the nomadic peoples of Central Asia, and the mountain peoples of the Caucasus predate the forced Russification and the rapid modernization of the Soviet period and document traditional costumes and ways of life.

Russian Peasant Girls

Young Russian peasant women offer berries to visitors to their izba, a traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River near the small town of Kirillov.

Nomadic Kazakhs on the Steppe

Many Central Asiatic peoples, for example the Kirghiz, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks, lived nomadic lives on the steppes, valleys, and deserts, migrating seasonally from one place to another as opportunities for obtaining food, water, and shelter changed. Shown here is a young Kazakh family in colorful traditional dress moving across the Golodnaia (or "Hungry") steppe in present-day Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Jewish Children with their Teacher

Samarkand, an ancient commercial, intellectual, and spiritual center on the Silk Road from Europe to China, developed a remarkably diverse population, including Tajiks, Persians, Uzbeks, Arabs, Jews, and Russians. Samarkand, and all of West Turkestan, was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century and has retained its ethnic diversity up to the present. Prokudin-Gorskii captures here a group of Jewish boys, in traditional dress, studying with their teacher.

Children sit on the side of a hill near a church and bell-tower in the countryside near White Lake, in the north of European Russia.

Russian Settlers in the Borderlands

Ethnic Russian settlers to the Mugan Steppe region, south of the Caucasus Mountains and west of the Caspian Sea, established a small settlement named Grafovka. The region is immediately north of the border with Persia. Settlement of Russians in non-European parts of the empire, and particularly in border regions, was encouraged by official government policy and accounts for much of the Russian migration to Siberia, the Far East, and the Caucasus regions.

People at Work

By the eve of World War I, Russia had undergone rapid industrial development, much of it fueled by foreign investment and the import of technology from Western Europe. Key industries included textiles, metal-working, and chemical and oil production. At the same time, many people lived in appallingly backward conditions, especially in the countryside.

Workers pose while harvesting tea. This region of the Russian Empire, in present day Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, had a significant Greek minority, some families going back many centuries to the Classical and Byzantine eras.

Wooden mills using wind-power to grind wheat and rye are photographed in the middle of summer on the vast Siberian plain in rural Ialutorovsk county in Western Siberia.

A. P. Kalganov poses with his son and granddaughter for a portrait in the industrial town of Zlatoust in the Ural Mountain region of Russia. The son and granddaughter are employed at the Zlatoust Arms Plant--a major supplier of armaments to the Russian military since the early 1800s. Kalganov displays traditional Russian dress and beard styles, while the two younger generations have more Westernized, modern dress and hair styles.

An early autumn scene from 1909 shows farmers taking a short break from their work to pose for their photograph. The location, though unidentified, is probably near the town of Cherepovets in north central European Russia.

The city of Samarkand was surrounded by oases and agricultural regions that supported the urban population. Traditional food crops grown on fields such as these included melons, wheat, beans, rice, and barley.

Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War

In the early years of the First World War, Prokudin-Gorskii photographed a group of prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The men are probably Poles, Ukrainians, and members of other Slavic nationalities, imprisoned at an unidentified location in the far north of European Russia near the White Sea. This image escaped being confiscated by border guards--the fate of the vast majority of politically sensitive images--when Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia for good in 1918--probably because what is being represented is not immediately obvious.