One Way Ticket to Siberia

A platzkart carriage is the Soviet idea of collective travel preserved into the present: an open-plan sleeping car on a long-distance train, common across the former Soviet world. It has no private compartments. Instead, it stretches out as a shared interior lined with berths—four bunks in each bay on one side, and two side berths along the corridor. In other words, it is a sleeping car without privacy, but not without intimacy.

Strangers spend several days there side by side, eating, sleeping, arguing, sighing, and staring through the window at a country too large to grasp all at once. It is both public and intimate at the same time—a place where the body has very little privacy, but the soul, oddly enough, sometimes begins to speak.

People say that photography has something in common with theft, and that photographers resemble petty thieves. As a photographer, I feel this most strongly when I intrude upon personal space. Curiosity, perhaps. Sleeping people—their postures, their defenselessness, their image—are strikingly different from people awake. You notice this during the day, when you talk to them and watch them, and then again at night, when, like a thief, you photograph them asleep—stealing their sleep, or their image, or perhaps the images of their dreams. It does not really matter what exactly is being stolen. What matters is that it feels like theft, and that leaves one uneasy.

Uneasy: sleep has always seemed to me a little like death. You lie on the upper side berth in a platzkart carriage as if in a coffin, or at least in some confined and measured space, feet first in the direction of the train’s movement. At first you photograph someone from above, or someone passing by, almost for amusement. Then someone below, stretched out on a lower berth. And after that you can no longer stop. You begin to feel freer. Breathing becomes easier.

You climb down and move stealthily among the sleeping passengers, feet first or head first. Heads, hands. Smell. The smell of women’s underarms and men’s socks. The smell of instant noodles, hard-boiled eggs, and chicken either boiled or fried in cheap sunflower oil. Such a real jazz of smells that at times it seems as if these people have not fallen asleep at all but died, poisoned by the air around them. And so you drift among them, not quite sure whether they are sleeping or dead, until at last, exhausted and worn out, you fall asleep yourself.

Oleg Klimov, Photographer's Diary. Carriage 4, Train 044, Moscow–Novosibirsk, 2025

P.S. I share photographs as part of a commitment to documentary storytelling — focusing on themes that the mass media tend to ignore for lack of a news hook, and that gain little attention on social networks. These are images from the everyday lives of ordinary people — lives that seldom reach the front pages, yet contain their own quiet drama. If you’d like to contribute to either, you’re very welcome.