Or so they say. This BBC slideshow of photographs made on the eve of revolution by the Russian ariotocrat, Sergei Michaolovich Prokudin-Gorrskii can even make povertry look beautiful. It is of course literally a snapshot of a world that was about to disappear, and that alone is enough to make it noteworthy.
For our course however it gives a visual representation of Lenin’s declaration that the Tsar’s Empire was in fact a “prison of peoples”. In an age of growing nationalism this was only ever going to increase as a problem. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the official policy of Russification usually made things worse. Here we can note that many of the leading Communists came from the repressed races. Trotsky was a Jew, Lenin had Tartar blood, Stalin and Beria were Georgians and Khrushchev was from Ukrainian peasant stock.
