St. Petersburg: Portrait of an Imperial City

New York: Vendome Press, 1990. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good/very good. Quarto; pp; 240, index; profusely illustrated with three hundred plus previously unpublished black and white photographs; brown cloth lettered in gilt in a pictorial dust jacket;. Dust jacket notes: "Over three hundred magnificent, unpublished photographs from archives in the Soviet Union recreate life as it was lived in one of Europe's most beautiful cities. Covering the years from the turn of the century to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, they capture Russia's capital on the Baltic as the nation's cultural and political center. Peter the Great and his successors intent on creating a 'Venice of the North,' engaged Europe's finest architects for its monumental buildings. These rare photographs reveal the original splendor of the city: the Orthodox churches and their elaborate ceremonies, the palaces and pageantry of the Romanovs, the elegant shops and the grand boulevards, traveled in winter by horse-drawn sleighs. They depict businesses, factories and impoverished workers, as well as citizens participating in ordinary daily life -- firemen, artists, students and dancers, at home and at work. Finally, scenes from the outbreak of war predominate, as St. Petersburg becomes Petrograd, losing its status as Russia's capital to Moscow."