Russian Empire Archives - Russian Tumble

In an earlier post, The “Foreigner”, I wrote about my fascination with finding what looked like a Russian critique of an especially Russian view of outsiders. Much has been made in the Western media recently about attempts by the Putin government to blame domestic political unrest on foreign influence; Notably, the signing of a law in July labeling Russian NGO’s that receive money from abroad as “foreign agents”, and the expulsion in October of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). These actions are described in the West as efforts by the Putin government to curb protests against alleged fraud in recent elections, and to repress dissent generally. I will argue that this reporting is somewhat unbalanced, but first I would like to briefly examine the history of Russia’s approach to the outside world, highlighting some of those things that have contributed to Russia’s reputation in the West as xenophobic and inherently distrusting of foreigners. Continue reading “Russia and the Rest”

pictures of russia-I, years just prior to W.W.I — Chapel on the Site Where the Old City of Belozersk Stood, 1909

A friend of mine turned me on to this collection of color photographs from the Russian Empire between the 1905 Revolution and the 1917 Revolutions. Most of these were taken between 1907 and 1912, with some taken in 1915, during World War I.

pictures of russia II- years just prior to W.W.I — View of the Solovetskii Monastery from the Land, 1915

These are all the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, a Russian chemist and photographer who received a commission from Tsar Nicholas II to travel in a specially equipped train car to document the people and places of the empire using his own method for taking color photographs, a method that involved using three cameras to take the shots, and three projectors to show the final prints, each equipped with a red, green or blue filter. Prokudin-Gorskii’s original glass plates are part of the collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. The images available on the web have been digitally processed using a technique described on the Library of Congress website. Most of these images can also be viewed, and more easily scrolled through, on the Boston Globe website. I’ve included a sampling of them below.

pictures of russia III- years just prior to W.W.I — Emir of Bukhara, 1911

Besides providing some stunning pictures of Russia at the beginning of the 20^th century, an especially tumultuous time, these images also serve to remind us that the “Russian” Empire was far more an empire than it was Russian. Continue reading “Pictures of Russia: Empire between Revolutions”

John Dougherty

This is me at cafe Квартира 44 ("Apartment 44") in Moscow, enjoying some good Russian food, Cuban tobacco and Kentucky bourbon. I come to write this blog from my experiences as a student of Russian, a teacher of Russian history and with an interest in all things Russian. Since I was a teenager I have worked to reconcile the Cold War narrative in the U.S. of "Russians" as the greatest threat to American Way of Life, with the great genius and humanity I discovered in Russian literature. I feel that the more I learn about Russians, the more I learn about people in general—their successes and failures, hopes and fears, the good, the bad and the beautiful.