Color Photography from Early 1900s Russia

"The photographs of Russian chemist and photographer, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, show Russia on the eve of World War I and the coming of the revolution. From 1909-1912 and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii travelled across the Russian Empire, documenting life, landscapes and the work of Russian people. His images were to be a photographic survey of the time. He traveled in a special train car transformed into a dark room to process his special process of creating color images, a technology that was in its infancy in the early 1900’s."

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2009/10/21/color-photography-from-russian-in-the-early-1900s/comment-page-4/

What's so mind-boggling about this is that we see an image and we can usually estimate when the picture was taken by its print quality. We expect to see photos taken in the early 1900s to be black and white and look a certain way. These look like color photos from the 60s of people in costumes. Crazy!