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!

(Here’s a Ricochet member’s translation:)

KirkianWanderer

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).

 

Gary McVey (View Comment):

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 buy manuals anyway. But if you get the big engine you don’t have to shift as often.

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.

Gary McVey
Post author

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.

Gary McVey
Post author

Gary McVey (View Comment):

Poland, like Russia, licensed a Fiat plant. Romania licensed theirs from Renault to make the Dacia, which much later on was replaced by a no longer current Chevy Nova subcompact. Hungary specialized in Ikarus buses. Czechoslovakia made some good cars before and after the war, and Skoda was one of the few Eastern national brands that survived the fall of the Wall.

SkipSul (View Comment)

So did Dacia.

(G:) True, plus you can still buy a Russian Lada. But I would point out that both are, or were based on foreign imported designs. Skoda was an original, and had oddball, sometimes attractive and interesting cars all through the Communist period. Skoda survives today as basically an outpost of Volkswagen.

 

Gary McVey
Post author

In 1985 I visited Hungarofilm’s main studio in Budapest. It was still a Communist country, but had been wheeling and dealing for decades. They wanted western films made there; they had experienced, world class crews, decent facilities, and reasonably secure rights under the law. They made a good case for themselves. On the technical side they had the same German cameras, microphones, and mixing boards that Munich had.

Mind you, there were a couple of weaknesses. The gigantic lights that every film studios used to go on location were world standard, but they were hauled to locations in decrepit, worn out Zil Soviet trucks. The Hungarian boss production manager was droll. He didn’t lie. He said, “We suffer from an excess of Zil”.

Gary McVey
Post author

Americans have a specific “take” on the history of cars, and it’s a self-flattering one, most of the time rightly so. We didn’t invent the car (that honor goes, mostly, to Germany and France) but we were the first nation to make a going proposition of the idea that nearly everyone ought to be able to aspire to own a car. We were the first nation willing to, if necessary, turn itself upside down and inside out to ensure maximum automotive access to homes, shops, and work.

But we had to have a lot of other things going for us besides the Model T. A spreading automotive culture requires cars, of course, but it also requires a lot of less stylish stuff. Roads, mentioned in the OP. Driver training, almost always pretty elemental at first. But almost every nation on Earth quickly demands licensing and traffic laws as soon as they see the kind of carnage that inept, careless, inexperienced motorists cause. In most western countries, that’s led to insurance.

Of course, the roads can’t extend any farther than fuel can take them. From ancient times on, travelers have attracted food, fuel, lodgings–and law enforcement. This was as true on the Appian Way as it is on two lane desert highways. America had the capital to speculate on roadside restaurants, gas stations, and motels. The USSR didn’t, so it had to prioritize far more strictly. Even when it had the cars, it struggled to develop the infrastructure.

What about parking, an unglamorous but essential part of car ownership–hell, of course, I’d rather talk about the chromed twin headers on my old GTO–Because Soviet apartment blocks and boulevard shops were conspicuously built without parking in the 30s and 40s, they were frequently surrounded by informal, but bloodily defended courtyards full of illegal temporary wooden garages. Men liked to hang out there, allegedly working on their cars while socializing and drinking. I saw these five-and-dime Mafia parking lots sprout like mushrooms after the rain; it got to be a joke and then a national embarrassment.