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The Last Days of the Tsars

June 29, 2010, 11:12 am

Some really nice pre-WWI color photography from Russia.  I am a sucker for old color photos.

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Category: photography

5 Comments

  1. LoneSnark:

    It seems to me that Russia was not as poor and backward before communism as communist apologists would have us believe. Sure, the pictures show some pretty darn poor people, but many Americans were just as poor at that time.

    June 29, 2010, 12:19 pm

  2. Henry Bowman:

    Interesting, Warren, thanks for the link. My father-in-law's ancestors were from Chernigov (see photo 12/30); it's actually in the Ukraine.

    June 29, 2010, 2:13 pm

  3. GaryP:

    Shozhenitsyn said that when the Leninist took over there were only a few hundred political prisoners in Siberia.
    The Leninist ran tens of millions thru the Gulag, murdering many of them.
    The commie prisons kept the same bread ration as the czar's prisons only the commies measured the bread in grams instead of the czar's ounces. (That's a reduction of 28 fold)
    Robert Conquest has written about the Siberian gold mines. A new commissar took over and increased gold production dramatically while reducing prisoner deaths by halting brutal treatment. He (and his staff) were executed at Stalin's order because the goal wasn't to mine more gold, it was to kill the prisoners.
    Communism is responsible for the greatest crimes against humanity ever seen.
    Why Americans tolerate (and even celebrate) supporters of Che, Mao, Chavez, etc. is beyond me. Hopefully, Americans will never see the real face of communism--although history has a way of rewarding folly with irony. Maybe Michael Moore and Oliver Stone will get to enjoy the Gulag and the Marxist in academia will toil in the killing fields.

    June 29, 2010, 6:16 pm

  4. Gil:

    Or is it another case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"? Hence Tsarist Russia is fondly looked back upon by many.

    June 29, 2010, 7:56 pm

  5. Mark W:

    Sir, are you familiar with Albert Kahn's collection? In 1909 he commissioned a project to create a color photographic record of the peoples of the world. BBC did a series "The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn" which was recently broadcast over several nights on the Ovation channel. The link to the BBC series, book, and some of the Kahn autochromes is http://www.albertkahn.co.uk/index.html. Apparently there are many thousands of images, kept at the Musee' Albert Kahn in Paris (link at the BBC site.) My wife and I were both utterly enchanted by the images shown on the BBC series.

    June 30, 2010, 12:00 pm