Pictured: Remarkable pictures of the last days of the Russian Empire before the revolution show a country of ancient traditions and colourful cultures

These women harvesting tea on a plantation near Chavka in Georgia in 1910 are believed to be mainly Pontic Greeks, an ancient community that originally lived along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia. Many later migrated to the Caucasus, where they came under the protection of the Tsar, a fellow Orthodox Christian

This picture shows a tea packing and weighing room at the Chakva tea farm and processing plant outside Batumi in present-day Georgia, in 1910. Tea is still grown in Georgia and the vast majority of it is exported to Russia

Prokudin-Gorsky was still taking his photographs when the First World War broke out in 1914. Russia found itself fighting both Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A year later he took this photograph of Austro-Hungarian prisoners  held at a camp in Karelia, north of St Petersburg, which was renamed Petrograd to make it sound less German

A merchant at a Samarkand market displays silks, cotton and wool fabrics as well as traditional carpets in 1911. At the top of the stall is a framed page of the Koran. Samarkand was captured by the Russians in 1866 but is now in Uzbekistan

Five inmates look out from a zindan, a traditional Central Asian prison in 1910. Their guard is wearing a Russian-style uniform, and is armed with a Russian rifle and bayonet. Zindan is an ancient Persian word for a dungeon but it was brought back into use in the early part of the 21st century during the war between Russia and Chechen rebels

A group of Jewish boys, in traditional dress, are pictured studying with their teacher in Samarkand in modern Uzbekistan in 1910. Samarkand is an ancient city on the Silk Road and Jews had lived their for hundreds of years but most have since emigrated to Israel or the United States

This magnificent gentleman is Muhammad Alim Khan bin Abdul-Ahad, who was the Emir of Bukhara in modern-day Uzbekistan from 1910 until 1920, when the emirate was abolished by Lenin's communist government

This Daghestani couple are wearing traditional dress in the Gunib region of the Northern Caucasus mountains. The photograph was taken around 1910. Daghestan is a region on the Caspian Sea coast, east of Chechnya

A family iron-mining operation in the Bakaly hills outside Ekaterinburg in 1910. Iron was smelted for the growing steelworks as the empire slowly industrialised. Ekaterinburg was ironically the place where the tsar, and the rest of the Romanov dynasty, were summarily executed in 1918

This group of men in traditional Muslim dress were photographed somewhere in Caucasus mountains in 1910. Russia, which was an Orthodox Christian country, had conquered the North Caucasus region in the 19th century and many of its subjects, like the Chechen and the Ingush, were Muslims 

The subject of this photograph is Pinkhus Karlinskii, the 84-year-old supervisor of a floodgate at Chernigov. He is standing on a raft by a ferry dock on the Mariinsk canal in 1909. The canal was a vast undertaking which linked the mighty Volga river with the Baltic Sea

This man, photographed in Daghestan in 1910, is wearing traditional Sunni Muslim dress and an Astrakhan hat. His hand rests on the blue scabbard of his dagger and on his chest appears to be some sort of war medal. Five years earlier the empire had lost the Russo-Japanese War

This woman, wearing traditional Bashkir dress, was photographed on the steps leading to her home in the Ural mountains in 1910. This was long before people knew how to pose and smile in front of a camera. The Bashkirs are a Turkic people whose traditional homeland straddles the Urals

These men are convicts, who have been shackled together at a prison camp somewhere in the interior, in 1910. The term 'Gulag' was only coined later for Stalin's vast network of prison camps but in the tsar's days many prisoners were housed in equally terrible conditions

These men and boys, wearing traditional dress, are pictured in Samarkand in 1910. Prokudin-Gorsky's caption for this photograph describes them as Sarts, a term which was used at the time to describe all Central Asian ethnicities, although these men and boys are probably Uzbek or Tajik

Ethnic Russian settlers in Grafovka in the Mugan steppe region in present-day Azerbaijan in 1910. Throughout the 19th century and early 20th century the tsar and his advisers encouraged ethnic Russians to settle in the Caucasus and in Central Asia, where they played a key role in Russification and maintaining loyalty to Moscow

A Daghestani man and his wife in traditional dress, pose uncomfortably for a photograph in the Caucasus mountains in 1910. It is difficult for us to imagine how alien it was to pose for a photograph as most people had never seen an image of themself, except in a mirror

This picture shows the traditional Russian dress of the time. Taken in 1910 in the town of Zlatoust in the Ural mountains, it shows a gentleman called A P Kalganov (left) with his son and granddaughter, who both worked at the Zlatoust arms factory, which produces swords for the Russian Army. Zlatoust is near the city of Chelyabinsk

A view, from the bell tower of the Church of the Transfiguration, over the city of Tobolsk in Siberia in 1912. At the time Tobolsk's major employer was the timber industry but nowadays the city is dominated by an oil refinery

Logs being floated down the Peter I canal near the small town of Shlisselburg - which was renamed Petrokrepost in 1944 and regained its old name in 1992 - on Lake Ladoga in 1909

Prokudin-Gorsky took this image of colourfully dressed bureaucrat wearing a traditional full-length coat in Bukhara in 1910

Prokudin-Gorsky himself is pictured here (far right, with two Cossacks) on the Murmansk railway in 1915. He travelled around the empire on the railways, which were expanding rapidly at the time. But his travels ended before the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which finally arrived in Vladivostok in the Far East in 1916