Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: Cultural & Artistic Influence

Prokudin-Gorsky's plates are the most extensive colour record of the Russian Empire in its final decade. They show a world that the Revolution, civil war and the Soviet era would transform: monasteries and wooden churches later closed or destroyed, imperial institutions, old trades, and the ethnic and religious variety of an empire stretching from Finland to Central Asia. Because he captioned his plates carefully by place, they are also an exact geographic document of towns along the Volga, the Mariinsky waterway and the Urals.

His intent was educational: the survey was meant to teach Russian schoolchildren about their own country. That purpose survives in a new form. Since the Library of Congress put the collection online and mounted The Empire That Was Russia in 2001, his images have reached a worldwide audience, and the Library's description that the collection carries no known restrictions has made them a shared public resource for historians, teachers and anyone curious about pre-revolutionary Russia.