Sorting (in the colloquial language of railroad workers, "Sorting" means shunting yard)

The year before last the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art invited me to make an exhibition at the Perm-2 Railway Station. The management of the station intended to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War.

I didn't want to focus only on stories about the merits of the railroad during the Great Patriotic War, so I shifted the emphasis to a feeling of the time when people and things were taken out of their routine and became a tool for reaching the goals of the government. The railroad became the main line connecting the rear and the front. Trains took soldiers to the front and the wounded to the rear, evacuated civilians and industry. At the end of the war prisoners of the Red Army returned by the same route. Each railroad had a transport department of the NKGB, which conducted interrogations of returned POW soldiers.

The source of my work for the exhibition was the collection of documents "War through the Eyes of POWs" edited by Oleg Leibovich on the basis of declassified inspection and filtration cases. I used a line-length filtered list of questions that the interrogators asked POWs. My work failed to pass the censorship of the main railroad administration in Moscow, while the railway administration in Perm and Yekaterinburg gave the go-ahead.