Found this on POTN, thought it was pretty damn cool.
"With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due
to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back
in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken
between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich
Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the
Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a
specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly
quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to
later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near
true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the
bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are
looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken,
neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected
here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the
Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in
1948"
And my computer still won't let me link.. so here it is
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html