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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
Chrome is bourgeois, comrade.
I’m still not seeing a car that I’d confuse with the Pobeda from the vantage point of 2020. Maybe the chassis and innards could have been built on the same factory line, but the Soviets must have done some major reworking of the molds and stamping dies for the sheet metal work.
I wonder if there was an earlier version of the Pobeda that was more like an Opel clone. I’ve been looking at photos of the one that later became ubiquitous. Haven’t found photos of an earlier model, yet.
I’m not sure it even met 1970s Chrysler standards.
My wife and I traveled to Russia in December of 1996. One of the cars we rode in was a station wagon and had a logo that made me think, “This is a Russian Impala.”
I buy manuals anyway. But if you get the big engine you don’t have to shift as often.
I’ve ridden in one, and its “Luxury” marque, the Wartburg (that was on the Autobahn, which was doubly frightening). One of the biggest problems with the Trabi was that no spare parts were made for them. Seriously. You talked about the problem of theft in Russia, but it was a problem in the DDR as well, since people had to cannibalize from other Trabis to keep their own rolling. When I was there in ’93 you still saw Trabis all over the place – as often as not on blocks or otherwise immobilized so as to be a ready source for bits and bobs to keep others running.
The waiting list for Trabis was very long. I was told it was not uncommon to wait up to 10 years after you’d already been cleared as worthy to purchase one.
I’m looking at this on my phone (so the picture is very small) and I swear to God for a second I thought that was Al Sharpton.
Have you ever seen a Dodge Ram pickup more than two years old that didn’t have the wheel wells rusted out?
The pull of western “real” cars on Russians was very strong. There’s a book out called Everyday Saints (I mentioned it on my Dormition Iconography post). There is a figure who weaves in and out of the other stories until one gets to the final chapters – Father Raphael. He was a close friend and mentor of the author in his own early days as a monastic, and was the younger brother of one of the most famous Soviet Dissidents, Alexander Ogorodnikov (his older brother’s reputation is why Raphael, who had been a hero of the Sino-Soviet quasi-war and thus groomed for high rank, was allowed to become a monk, and then a priest, instead of being arrested too – the KGB didn’t want TWO dissidents from the same family).
Father Raphael, before being drafted into the Red Army, had been a highly skilled and upcoming rally car driver, and even though monks are supposed to foreswear material possessions, he never did with cars or sporty driving. To keep him out of the limelight, for he was a popular priest, the KGB kept ordering him to be moved to obscure and crumbling parishes in the boonies. That gave Father Raphael the excuse he needed to obtain and lovingly service his own car, a clapped out Zaphorets that he rebuilt with some improvements. To top it off, he had it painted black and installed white curtains around the rear windows, in a blatant mimicry of the cars all the government bigwigs were chauffeured in, and he would then routinely harass these government cars on the road by tailgating them, racing them, and showboating. As a skilled rally driver, he was also fearless on the snowy rutted backroads, to the point where many people refused to ride with him.
But he lusted (I use that word deliberately) after a “Real” car, not a Soviet one, and that desire grew and grew within him. Eventually he was gifted one by a party official who credited Father Raphael with bringing him to Christ and saving his marriage. It was a red Mercedes. He could push that Zaphorets to its limits, but its limits were bounded – anyone who has ever started out as a teenager with a junked out old hatchback, or run down family cruiser, or a tired out farm pickup knows, at least subconsciously, how you can push those things right to the edge and have a ball, but also how when you first drive a real powerhouse that the guardrails of anemic performance, loose tires, and overall decrepitude are gone.
Father Raphael, who performed miracles with a Zaphorets on a dangerous snowy country road in a Soviet winter, lost control of his dream Mercedes on a modern highway in an ordinary rainstorm. The car killed him.
They come with wheel wells?
No way I’m singing, but:
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!
Такие песни исполнял Прокофьев. Маршируя в Красный Парад,
Парни как мы, у нас был хороший жизнь
Это были деньки
Не нужны выборы, девочки были девочками и мужчины были мужчинами
Друг, мы могли бы использовать мужчина как Иосиф Сталин снова!
У нас было идеальное государство всеобщего благосостояния. Каждый человек сделал свою работу,
Боже, наши запорожцы отлично справились,
Это-были-деньки!
(I did change some of the figurative language, because it doesn’t translate straight, but the grammar at least should be okay).
My Russian friends used to tell me that Ladas needed their engines rebuilt every 3k miles. They meant it seriously. 1980s-era Ladas had 60-70hp, and managed 0-60 in 15-23 seconds.
Most Americans today have no concept of how truly awful a bad car really is.
I’d be remiss if I passed up the chance to insert my second favorite USSR joke.
Alexei was the star worker in Radio Tube Factory #43. Because he exceeded his quotas in all 12 months of 1971, he was awarded a brand new car. When he was told to be at the car dealership on the morning of August 12th, 1974 to take delivery of his new car, he began to cry.
”Oh, Alexei, I see you are overwhelmed with gratitude for the state and the generosity of Comrade Brezhnev.”
”No, Comrade Manager, these are not tears of joy. I can’t pick up the car on August 12, 1974. I have to be at my apartment. That’s the day the plumber is coming.”
Very good! I didn’t even know that деньки was a word one could use for the plural of days. Is that a common usage? Mostly poetic? (This barely scratches the surface of what I don’t know about Russian.)
Спасибо большое. It’s the plural of денёк (день‘s diminutive). I can’t say with absolute certainty, but based on some dictionary searching and what we’ve practiced with colloquial Russian, I’d say it’s mostly poetic and probably also used in songs, because it can rhyme with different words than день, which could be a pain to do with the soft sign. I’ve never seen that diminutive in conversation, the proper names make up most commonly used diminutives, so I suspect it’s the case.
But my understanding is that they were so simple they could almost be rebuilt at the side of the road. And that the frames and suspensions were sturdier than the Fiats on which they were based, because of the awful condition of Soviet roads. Those features (rugged frame and suspension and easy repair) apparently contributed to their successful export to some remote areas of Europe (see photo in Comment #9 by @muleskinner ).
Has anyone here actually owned a Russian car? I’d like to hear from them!
I read somewhere and can’t verify it, that the Soviet engineers copied a Studebaker truck part-by-part for their own production. Copied it so exactly that all their trucks had the same serial number on the engine block as the original.
A heroic effort to make sense of my parody!
Similar spirit–
Two men are standing at a Moscow street corner. One says to the other, “Take a look at that Chaika. Think it’s as good as the Mercedes over there?”
“Of course, comrade, it’s a far better auto”.
“Say, you really don’t know cars, do you?”
“No, comrade, I don’t know you“.
I was 55 when I bought a 350 hp GTO. I had to keep that kind of story in mind. The car makes you think you can do anything.
That was “America’s automotive secret”. We were almost always lazy shifters, especially compared to the punctilious Germans. But we got away with it, and with 3 speed gearboxes instead of four, because we were a land of big, long stroke, luggable six cylinder cars that didn’t demand much shifting.
But shifting is fun! Can’t say I like it when I’m stopped in a rental car, facing uphill at a stoplight, but German stoplights made it easier by going from red to yellow to green. So one can anticipate.
When renting cars in Germany, automatics were usually not available, at least for the smaller-sized cars we rented. If I reserved one well in advance I could probably get an automatic, but we were at first renting them for day trips from smaller cities, using trains for travel between cities. That was getting to be a nuisance for us. Trains were not running on time, no matter what they say about German efficiency, and we were wasting time they we could have spent on other things. When we were in Lüneburg I studied the situation some more, and learned that contrary to what I had been told, I could rent a car in Germany and drive it far into Poland and back. And the autobahns didn’t sound so scary, after all. So we rented a small VW for the remaining 12 days or whatever. The people at Sixt told me they didn’t have any automatic transmission rentals like that available. I told them I’d take one if they had it, but manual would be fine. My wife didn’t want to drive, anyway. I enjoyed driving it, but didn’t care to drive it as fast on the autobahn as I would have my own car, so spent a lot of time passing the truck traffic while staying out of the way of the really fast cars coming up behind me. I got a couple of automated speeding tickets anyway, I guess for not slowing down enough in restricted zones.
Before that my most recent experience with a manual was my daughter’s old Ford Escort. That was a noisy car and not a pleasure to drive. She had bought it so she could learn to handle a stick shift when she got back to Ireland (where she lives now). It was my job to drive it home from the dealer and teach her how to drive it. I took her to our church parking lot, where I let her do the usual jumps and stops while she got used to it. When she finally was ready, she took it out on a residential street, driving on the left. I let her go a ways, then reminded her that in this country people usually drive on the right. “Oh, yeah!” When she finally got a car in Ireland, it was a little Toyota Yaris, and it seemed to me when she drove us around that she was a crazier driver than most of the Irish. But now she drives a used Prius with automatic. Her partner, who had never in his life driven an automatic before, got used to it, too.
My wife is not interested in learning to drive a manual transmission, even though she drove her father’s John Deere B tractor when she was 7 years old. No automatic transmission on those things.
Are you talking about cars, or is this a metaphor for Americans in general?
But then you didn’t shift them after you started moving.
I’m either millennial or a bit younger (I think 99 is a close year between that and Gen Z), and while I was taught how to drive manual and can do it, I don’t enjoy it. I have a very distinct memory of coming off of our town’s exit onto Route 2, trying to shift into the correct upper gear, then having the person in front of me slow down and having to shift down and stop, and when I tried to start again the car stalling, so that I was *this* close to getting rear ended. My 1996 Mazda Miata (dad bought it for $400 on Craigslist) has a button on the shift that makes it feel like you’re driving manual even though it’s automatic, which is as much as I need of that experience.
Did you mean “manual”? It sounds like you are describing a manual shifter.
Yep, my brain went in exactly the wrong direction. Thanks for catching that.
The Trabant had one of the only (semi-) automatic transmissions on Eastern bloc cars, the Hycomat. It worked like Chrysler’s ’40s Fluid Drive; you used the clutch for reverse or forward, but in forward gear it shifted itself and didn’t need to be taken out of gear when stopping.