Do we think about the past in colour? Definitely not with a vividness of colour. Aided by the black-&-white photos of the past we imagine the past as grey. That people lived their lives in a world that was somehow more muted than ours. That somehow life in the modern world is more 'real'. Nonsense of course. People lived their lives in the same world of colour as we do.

These colour pictures are extraordinary, in that they add colour to a world, which to the extent that we have photographs of the period, are all black-&-white. (See this blog for example). In some ways it shocks. They really were like people of today, not somehow of dimmed sensations, which allowed them to live through some of the tragedies of twentieth century Russia.