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

In 307 photographs, many never before published, this extraordinary pictorial record of an emerging bourgeois St. Petersburg shows the face of a city that brims with a sense of hopefulness amid rapid social change. The book takes us to grimy factories and fashionable balls, city hospitals and church services. Stunning, atmospheric photos show magnificent cathedrals and buildings long since vanished and trace the ascendancy of electric trams and motorcars. Also recorded are the teeming variety of people, the bloody protest during the Russian Revolution of 1905, the daily activities of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, and soldiers going to the trenches in 1914 for a war that would forever transform the imperial Russian capital. Shots of Tchaikovsky, Lenin, Nabokov, Mendeleyev, Pavlov and Nicholas Roerich, of artists, writers and actors, reflect Petersburg's pivotal importance. Readable essays by four Soviet historians and a foreword by Billington, Librarian of Congress, provide ample historical context. (Apr.)