Photos they did have 100 years ago in Russia too. But to manage to see ordinary peasants’ cheeks blush and how their clothes were really so colourful, it makes you realize how flawed our vision of the past has become due to the limitations of black & white technology.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), a chemist, but also a photographer, managed to bring these old photos to life with the help of color-filtered plates of glass. So what we have here is a collection of photos taken in the Russian Empire from 1909 until 1912, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire the Town of Mezhgore

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Peasant Girls

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Workers Harvesting Tea

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Dagestani People

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Handcar on the Murmansk Railway

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Harvest Time

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Three Generation of Workers at the Zlatoust Plant

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Armenian Women

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Mariinskii Canal

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Cotton Harvest in Sukhumi Botanical Garden

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Emir Bukharskii from Bukhara

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Novaia Ladoga

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Head Study

100 Years Old Color Photos of the Russian Empire Lilacs

Photos from Library of Congress.