This is from that incredible collection of tourist photographs of Russia that went viral last week. These were taken by American tourist Murray Howe in 1909, posted to flickr in 2011 by his great grandson Andrew Howe V of Atlantic Beach, Florida. These images almost have the feeling of Lewis Hine in Czarist Russia (with all the documentation of street people and child vendors) but in this case rather than backdrops of the burgeoning American capitalist juggernaut, you see the empty grandeur of Imperial Russia. Is it any wonder what happened eight years later?
