Volunteering at the New England Seafarer's Mission I ran across the magazine Russian Life. On the inside cover was an ad for their 2007 calendar, featuring pictures by photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorky taken 1909-1915. P-G's technique was to take three identical photos with different color filters, then overlap them to create a color photo. He took 3500 photos throughout the 11 regions of a Russia that was about to disappear to the October Revolution.
On the other hand, the Russian peasantry and countryside don't look so different today. You may draw what lesson from that you like, but I lean to the view that "communism was a tremendous vehicle for making and keeping people impoverished."
The photos are quite remarkable and are preserved at the Library of Congress. You can find 1900 of them online at a site about Prokudin-Gorsky. The calendar is sold out, unfortunately.
I saw some of the pictures at the Library of Congress years ago. The peacefulness of the scenes depicted was palpable.
ReplyDeleteIt was unbearably poignant to see scenes that would soon be overrun but a murderous pestilential slime who would upend all that had been accomplished over the centuries.
Who thought that a tidal wave of sewage was in the offing?
Today I think of scenes of Europe with Islamic faces everywhere on the streets. The same feeling is there too. Foreboding.
Death and destruction are waiting in the wings.