Before the Revolution: St. Petersburg in Photographs : 1890-1914

Before the Revolution evokes the vanished world of tsarist Russia from the extravagant pomp and wealth of the nobility to the extreme poverty of the masses. Many of the photographs in this volume have never been published previously and have been reproduced from black-and-white glass plate negatives found in the Central State Archive of Cinema and Photo Documents of Leningrad--one of the largest archives of its kind in the Soviet Union. A history of the former capital of Russia is provided by four distinguished Soviet historians with a foreword by James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress.