Multinational wealth of the Russian Empire of the 1870s‑1880s

In 1864, a young resident of Ohio, George Kennan, joined a group of researchers in search of a possible route for laying a telegraph cable from the Bering Strait through Siberia to Europe as an alternative to a cable across the Atlantic Ocean. Kennan spent two years exploring the cold and wild expanses of the Russian Empire and meeting many representatives of the local population. Plans for the construction of a telegraph line were forgotten as soon as the cable was laid on the bottom of the Atlantic.

The frustrated American returned to his homeland with nothing, but his diaries, which he published under the title Tent Life in Siberia ("Tent Life in Siberia"), became a bestseller. In 1870, Kennan returned to Russia and traveled by ship from St. Petersburg along the Volga to the Caspian Sea. From there he traveled to the Caucasus Mountains, where he met Georgians, Armenians and representatives of many other ethnic groups.

Kennan worked in the USA as a journalist for more than ten years and in 1885 he came to Russia again. This time the researcher went from St. Petersburg to the east and traveled through Altai on the border with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, through Siberia to the gold mines along the Kara River. He described the terrible conditions of prisoners in prisons and camps in Siberia (because of which the authorities later expelled him from the country), and also collected hundreds of postcards depicting a huge variety of subjects of the Russian emperor - from city officials to recently freed serfs, religious leaders and soldiers on the periphery of the vast Russian Empire.

Chechen men at a wedding.

Afro-Abkhazian highlander.

Two Kazakh women, the bride on the left.

Burut.

Tatars in a small village near Minusinsk.

Georgian.

Persian.

The Great lama of the Selenginsky Datsan.

Kazakh musician plays the dombra.

Kazakh horsemen.

Georgian.

Armenian.

A man from Transcaucasia.

Tatar women and children.

Two musicians.

Bek of Ingushetia.

Men from Transcaucasia.

A man with his daughters.

A rich couple from Buryatia.

A woman in a traditional dress.

Kazakh couple.

An Arab man from Jerusalem.

Caucasian Gypsy.

Muezzin from a mosque in Tbilisi.

An Armenian woman.

Mullah at the wedding.

Znamensky, the police chief in Minusinsk, with a stuffed wolf's head.

A Persian man with a gun.

Georgians.

Georgians.

A mail team in Siberia.

Highlander.

Christopher Fomich Makovsky, head of the Irkutsk police.

Dagestan highlander.

Alexander Alexandrovich Bunge, Russian traveler and Arctic explorer.

Georgians.

Alexander II, Emperor of Russia from 1855 to 1881.