Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Cars for Comrades
“Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile”, by Lewis Siegelbaum is one of the rare English language histories of that country’s motor industry, and it’s really more of a Soviet story than a car book.
The central paradox that gives the tale its drama is Communism’s ambiguous, and ultimately changing official attitude, towards the car. Evidently “auto” in early Russian parlance includes a range of rugged large vehicles that include all but the largest overland trucks. If there’s one country whose ex-urban areas justify the use of SUVs and similarly tall, hulking vehicles it surely is Russia.
Officially discouraged if not actively condemned by Marxists, private car ownership was one of the world’s most visible symbols of freedom but also, at least in poor countries, of inequality. It’s often remarked how astonished Soviet audiences were when the brief wartime romance between the US and the USSR brought films like “The Grapes of Wrath” to Russian audiences: “You mean the American poor people own their own automobiles? And they’re free to just get up and leave when famine hits, obtaining no permits, to wherever in America they can find work? Incredible!”
Each phase of this transition is associated here with a particular new city, a particular new labor campaign that in each case represented a generational plateau of Communist achievement. Like most pre-revolutionary Russian industries, the first major companies were located in Moscow, where the ZIS (“Stalin Auto Factory”) and then ZIL cars were made. Cheap Moskviches and Pobedas, war booty copies of Opels, were also made in the Soviet capital, but the new nation’s “Detroit” was the gigantic artificial industrial city built at the beginning of the thirties near the ancient town of Nizhny Novgorod. American Communist union organizers came from their shifts at Ford and GM plants to help supervise the construction of GAZ, the Gorky auto works, meant to be the largest factories in Europe.
There are long passages of “Cars for Comrades” about the endemic Russian curse of underdevelopment and isolating distances, summarized here as “roadlessness”; the automobile may have been regarded with suspicion, but the fact that peasant eagerness to drive cars made it easier to compel them to build roads was noticed by Soviet planners and acted on. The degree of this roadlessness is hard to comprehend; before the war, there were very few paved roads outside of the cities and surprisingly few paved roads even inside of them. With the harsh extremes of Russian weather, a country of dirt roads can quickly become an impossibly muddy quagmire in spring, a snowbound nightmare in winter, and a dusty, rutted ordeal to travel any distance on during the hot summer.
But after, roughly speaking, the Khrushchev years (1954-’64), car ownership ceased to be as exotic and rare as, say, private plane ownership is in the USA. Slowly it became more commonplace in the Soviet Union, if still not nearly as widespread as it was in the United States.
By the start of the seventies, the saga of Soviet carmaking shifted its major focus to VAZ, a vast, Fiat-based set of factories in Togliatti, a Russian city renamed after an Italian Communist. The plain wrap Lada sedans made in Togliatti were ubiquitous on all of my trips to Moscow and no doubt many formerly Soviet territories have lots of older people with fond memories of how their first Lada (in Russia, called Zhiguli at first) changes their lives. If your Moskvich or Volga was parked on city streets, the windshield wipers, hubcaps, and probably the tires would have been stolen. This happened to someone I knew there, a playwright with a privileged car. It was a four-door, or he dryly called it, a “Vordor”–Russian for “Thief”.
Quibbles, yeah, I have a few. More knowledge of the engineering side isn’t essential but it’s certainly helpful if you’re going to make pronouncements about the relative quality of Communist and capitalist consumer goods. Knowing how they really compared wouldn’t have hurt Siegelbaum or us, the readers; you’d have a much better idea of how and when Soviet cars were or weren’t up to world standard in technology or styling. There’s a little too much shallow readiness to assume that previous US observers of Soviet life were buffoons, promoting a “ballyhooed” economic system, too smug about the “supposed benefits of The American Way of Life” to convey the unvarnished truth. Siegelbaum’s the very opposite; I’d call him an ignorant anti-nationalist.
Not literally ignorant, of course; on the contrary, he’s a professor of history in Michigan, home of the US auto industry, and should know better than to assert, for example, that Russia’s shrunken and Mafia-ridden present-day auto industry has become much more successful in the business sense than Detroit, which has to struggle with foreign competition and has relatively less government-paid health and pension assistance with its army of retired UAW workers. The former Soviet auto bosses simply stiffed their workers and walked away from their social obligations after 1991; they used Kremlin connections to preserve their jobs and thus deprived fellow Russians of the chance to buy cheaper, better foreign cars that would have forced the domestic Russian industry to improve, as the Japanese forced our industry to improve.
Another criticism: Thank goodness Siegelbaum uses only a touch of the awful, pretentious jargon of post-seventies literary criticism that has ruined so many other highbrow books, but even the smallest trace can dull your reading pleasure, and I use the word “dull” advisedly. With elements adopted from feminism and Left theory, it became the universal language of the campus gasbag after 1975. Common and common-sense features of the recent old days are “explained” in stilted, artificial fashion: “The lack of women in long-distance trucking in the USSR in the 1930s can be read as a textual analysis of the gender contradictions of building a just socialist society”, that sort of thing.
Of course, it just could be that the absence of women from brutally hard, dangerous, and physically demanding mechanical jobs was considered normal pretty much always and everywhere until fairly recently; it could be that not too many little girls wanted to grow up to become truck drivers.
If one of the real strengths of “Cars for Comrades” is its unflinching willingness to note the broken promises and stunted dreams of the Communist era, an accompanying strength is its sympathy for those who people who lived in the USSR and had to try to make the system work; too often the actual people are treated as unruly, mysteriously ungrateful elements in an artificially rosy photo shoot.
Today there’s growing popular resentment against Russia’s new class of Mercedes-driving snobs and egomaniacs who seem to be inciting a mixture of outraged justice and nationalism. This connected directly to re-reading “Cars for Comrades”, and although the differences between historical epochs shouldn’t be ignored, neither should the similarities.
I’ve met at least one of the semi-villains, Nikita Mikhalkov, the film director and ultra-nationalist, notorious for his possession and use of a police light and siren to evade traffic and traffic laws. Some have asked, why should a film director have an official siren, normally reserved for VIPs involved in national defense? It turns out there are thousands of such pampered big shots, some of them as insolent and cruel as a young “lit-chick” writer who bitterly complained about the wasted sacks of ugly, poverty-stricken flesh who dared to cross the path of her fast German car. Despite a wave of popular outrage, her only punishment was expulsion from the Communist Party—and I thought that had been all but abolished 29 years ago. Some “Communist”; and that would have been a sad and entirely fitting epigraph for “Cars for Comrades”.
When I traveled to the USSR each year, friends here used to ask me what average Russians were like. They were probably thinking of Soviet posters of heroic workmen and farmers engaged in class struggle. “Like Edith and Archie Bunker”, I’d say.
The kinda songs Prokofiev played. Marching in the Red Parade,
Guys like us, we had it made
Those were the days
Didn’t need elections then, Girls were girls and men were men,
Buddy, we could use a man like Joseph Stalin again!
We had a perfect welfare state. Everybody pulled his weight,
Gee, our Zaporozhets ran great,
Those-were-the-days!
Published in General
Mikhalkov even played a big shot who thought traffic laws were for the little people, in Inspector GAI (1982). Most of Mikhalkov’s best roles were as obnoxious jerks. In this film there is an incorruptible traffic cop who doesn’t back down, despite getting reprimanded and demoted for his efforts.
I thought I had once watched it with English subtitles, but this version doesn’t have them. You almost don’t need them.
It was a bit of a left-handed blessing during the war. Roads that were seas of mud in the spring and the fall, combined with an idiosyncratic rail gauge, gave the invading Germans fits when it came to logistics. It made life harder for the Russians too, but at least they had locomotives and rolling stock that fit the railroads.
We sent the Soviets over 350,000 trucks via Lend-Lease (two lies separated by a hyphen). That helped a lot too.
A lot of unemployed autoworkers emigrated from the US to the Soviet Union for jobs with the burgeoning Russian automobile factories. Their story is pretty grim.
And Lenin was driven around in a Rolls Royce confiscated from the British embassy. No slouch Lenin. Just a thief.
Would I be missing out on much if I got it as a Kindle book?
BTW, to reinforce some of your points, some people might want to check out Sergei Sputnikov’s series of YouTube videos about Soviet Automobiles. He didn’t live through all those years, and I don’t think he ever owned a car when he was living in the USSR. His mother signed him up to purchase one, maybe when he was in high school. But there was a nine year waiting list, and it still would have taken quite an effort to pay for it when the time come. The USSR ceased to exist before the nine years were up, and he ended up living in the U.S., not so far from where I live. He’s fairly non-ideological about it, but he has to deal with a lot of ideologues, both left and right, in his comment section. He handles them more patiently than I could manage.
Tractors were the key to the future according to Soviet planners. Is there any mention of tractors vs autos in the book?
Yes, there is, as well as the big Soviet overlap between light trucks and passenger cars. Rough roads mean high ground clearances. Plenty of bosses of agricultural enterprises, like Machine-Tractor Stations, used pickups and stake-bed trucks as personal transport. But tractors came first. Farms already had horsebound ways to get crops to train depots.
I have to admit, the boring old Sov historians had a point that doesn’t seem to interest most American car histories: the biggest companies like Ford always had farm equipment as a key part of their growth. In the UK, it was Ferguson. When we joke about Soviet rom-coms set in tractor factories, we should acknowledge that the Russians badly needed the damn tractors and would do near anything to increase production. As has been shown.
They did export some cars toward the end. This Ladas made it to Greenland in 1981.
I wish Siegelbaum tossed in a few notes like that. Our WWII truck production was spearheaded by Dodge, Studebaker, and GMC/Chevrolet. GM owned Germany’s Opel, so most of its late Thirties products were based on stock GM designs adapted for European conditions. The corporation was kicked out of its own company by the Nazis by the beginning of 1940 but the overhead valve six cylinder engines from US Chevy trucks also powered German ones. Long after the war, this would be claimed to be GM being on both sides. They weren’t. But the technicality of American ownership didn’t discourage the Red Army from dismantling an Opel car plant in their sector and moving it, tools, dies, and stamping presses, to the USSR.
So there’s another minor beef with Siegelbaum, who does not seem like a bad guy: his lack of car knowledge prevents him from seeing the comically obvious truth that the Soviet Union’s first car intended for public purchase, the Pobeda (“Victory”) wasn’t “inspired” by the American-designed but German-built Opel, wasn’t “similar in many respects” to the Opel, it was a direct out and out steal of the entire car and the factory it was made in. But he can’t see that because he doesn’t have the knowledge.
They did indeed export Ladas, Niva SUVs, and Kamaz trucks, some of the biggest and sturdiest in the world. We shouldn’t treat all Soviet products as junk. I’ve seen plenty of durable, value-for-the-money Russian motorcycles, film production equipment, portable electrical generators, all kinds of stuff. They tend to specialize in rugged, harsh weather trains, planes, trucks, tractors.
(But when they are junk, man oh man are they junky. Lada rustproofing too seldom met, say, Daimler standards.)
Sometime in the 90s, Dolph Lundgren made a action/war movie in Eastern Europe. (I tried to figure out which movie it is; it’s shocking how similar the descriptions of his movies from that time are.)
In the movie, they use about a dozen motorcycles, that appear remarkably similar to those used by Germany in WWII. Except they are obviously brand-new. It took me way too long to realize that the movie was filmed in a former Soviet block country, using Russian military gear.
I forgot to put “Sputnikov” in quotes. That’s not his real last name. His real last name is on the book he wrote about his first year in the U.S., though.
He also calls himself “John Wayne Cheeseburger.” One of his viewers once berated him for using such a fake name as Sputnikov, saying it was as if an American called himself John Wayne Cheeseburger. So that name comes up every now and then.
Minneapolis-Moline tried to do both at once. The UDLX ComfortTractor was produced from 1938 to 1941. It was the first tractor with a cab. For service as an automobile, it had a 40 mile-per-hour road gear. But, I imagine it didn’t serve either purpose well, but pretty cool nevertheless.
I presume the Minsk tractor factory where workers went on strike to protest the Belarus elections this month is the famous factory that has made Belarus tractors since the Soviet days. I first learned about this line of tractors when we were heading into Poland on the autostrada from Germany. At a rest stop there was a small tractor with that label, and it made me think to myself, “Whoa! We really are getting near to eastern Europe.”
Belarus Tractor at a rest stop on the Autostrada in Poland. The Belarus Tractor Works in Minsk has been producing tractors since 1950.
But I learned that they are now sold worldwide, though I have yet to actually see one in the U.S. In Soviet days there was no dealer system to supply repairs and parts, so the tractors in those days were made to be repairable by kolkhozniks using materials and tools they had at hand.
I saw an article about this in Collectible Automobile or Hemmings Classic Car. The company made a promotional film of a mom, her mom, and the grand-daughter riding into town together.
I’ve been playing a Russian game, set after a nuclear apocalypse that occurred in 1986. You can still find the occasional workable automobile in the wasteland. There’s a merchant willing to sell you one in the city of Peregon:
Me, I drive a GAZ, but not from his store. I had to kill a whole mess of mutants before I could claim it.
I stuck my head into the back of one at a museum, and decided it might have worked as a family vehicle to drive to town on Saturday night if all family members were low BMI types and didn’t mind closeness.
This post gets a like just for the closing lyrics. Now we need a performance! Surely our talented Ricochetti can accomplish this. Then a Russian translation, of course.
Russian motorcycle and sidecar combos are sold by Ural, and I’ve seen them here on the west coast. They’re a good value.
In the Fifties and Sixties, two and three wheeled transportation took the place of the much yearned for car all over Europe, especially the poorer countries of Europe. That’s why Italy embraced the Vespa, and even one-day-to-be-mighty BMW built a bubble car with a motorcycle-sized motor, the Isetta.
Eastern Europe was even poorer, and made the climb up to minimal four-wheel motoring later and more slowly. The much-ridiculed East German Trabant was, in its day, an ingenious cheap car. Plastic bodied, but no Corvette. Two cycle engine, like a chain saw, about the size of a chain saw’s. Sounded like one, too.
The best detail of the Trabant is that when you put gas in it, you had to add oil to the gas tank (like all two-cycle engines). To mix the two you would grab on to the rear end and shake the car.
You can do a fair approximation of the Trabant’s engine noise by putting a handful of lug nuts into a coffee can and shaking really hard.
Europeans, especially European men, have long been sneerfully scornful of American drivers’ nearly 70 year long preference for automatic transmissions. They live in countries with narrow, twisty old roads and hills. They pay big gas taxes and import their oil, so they have smaller engines. They are used to rowing through the gears.
We live in a country with predominantly long, long, straight, flat roads that are usually plenty wide. We carry larger families. Most of us don’t take any more pride in shifting gears than we would in loading a dishwasher. We don’t care. We have the money to buy automatics.
I too am sneeringly scornful of drivers’ preference for automatic transmissions.
Hey, wait a minute! I care! (Wasn’t this supposed to be a site for conservatives?)
I dunno. I’ve seen a lot of Pobedas in Russian film, so I’ve been looking online at photos of both the 1938 Opel Kapitan and the Pobeda. (Somewhere the Internet told me the 1938 model was the one to compare.) I don’t know if I would ever mistake one for the other, based on external appearance. There is more “roundness” and plainness to the Pobeda design. And less glass. Also a lot less chrome, although maybe the Opels shown on the Internet are the chromed up versions. Fenders are entirely different. On the Pobeda they are integrated into the whole body in plainer fashion.
I’m not a car guy, so maybe I’m not looking at it right. Or maybe the 1938 Opel Kapitan is not the right model to compare.
That’s extremely true. Few westerners have ever heard the sound. Which branch of the IC are you in, exactly? Okay, don’t answer that.
That’s a much bigger car. Take a look at the 1936 Kadette or Olympia, named in honor of that year’s Olympic games in Berlin. Take a look at the way the headlights are “faired” into the fenders instead of hanging on them like bicycle lamps.
From One, Two, Three (1961)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x2oNMmpWKE&t=56s