Trans Siberian Railway
Trans Siberian Railway, 2017
The summer of 2017 I travelled on the Transsibirskaya Zheleznodoroznaya Magistral’, better known as Transiberian Railway, a 9000 km train ride from Moscow to Vladivostok. I photographed the trip and the people I met along the way. I chose to travel in the platscart, the third-class carriage, where I talked to soldiers on leave, families on holiday and students travelling home for the summer.
If one never gets off the train, the journey from Moscow to Vladivostok lasts 6 days. The train, travelling at the speed of a regional train (90km/h), makes multiple stops. At most stations all kinds of sellers can be found waiting on the platforms. They are usually women and they sell scarves, waffels filled with condensed milk and blueberries. Some of them carry a iron hanger with smoked fish hanging from the eye socket. Each carriage is run and administered by a key figure – mostly a woman – called provodnitsa. She is responsible for maintaining the order on the train, checking tickets and passports, handing out bedsheets. She is also the person that wakes you up 30 minutes before you need to get off the train.
I decided to get off the train multiple times, so that my trip lasted a month. The first stop was Ekaterinburg, a city located close to the Urals mountains, which separate eastern and western Russia. Here begins Siberia, an immense region extending until the Pacific Ocean. After Ekaterinburg I got back on the train and I stopped in Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. Then I spent some days on Olkhon Island, an island on lake Bajkal, the deepest lake in the world. Finally I went back to Irkutsk, where I caught a train to Ulan Ude. After Irkutsk the landscape and the people started to change, people started to resemble Mongolian people in their features. The only thing that still makes one feel that one’s in Russia is the language. Around Ulan Ude, Buddhist temples can be found and a strong tradition of shamanism too. I continued to Chita, Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish autonomous region, Khabarovsk and finally, at dawn, I arrived in the Far East, in Vladivostok.
