Cars for Comrades

The Life of the Soviet Automobile

Bibliographic Data

ID9801440
AuthorsM Dobson, Melina J Dobson (0000-0001-7272-1526, University of Sheffield, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume124
Issue509
Pages1005-1007
Publication date2009-07-16
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofCars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile, Lewis H Siegelbaum, 2011
VenueThe English Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ehr/cep200
OpenAlexW2001842030
LanguageEN

Visitors to today's Russia are often struck by the frantic pace of the gridlocked cities where cars clog the streets and jam every last corner of pavement and waste ground to be found; yet, as Lewis Siegelbaum's monograph shows, the explosion of car ownership since 1991 is not just a Western import but has its roots in the Soviet past. Today's automobile culture is largely the result of the Communist Party's commitment to nurturing its own manufacture of cars and trucks, its campaigns to develop the limited and poor network of roads it inherited from the Tsarist system, and its eventual acceptance of car ownership—once the ultimate symbol of capitalist individualism—as a necessary concession to consumer desires. The first part of Siegelbaum's book tells the story of the Soviet automobile industry and is broken down into three chapters, each focusing on a specific enterprise: the first, a pre-revolutionary automobile factory in Moscow which produced many of the country's trucks in the 1930s, as well as the luxurious ZIS-101 limo for ceremonially transporting party leaders; the second, the GAZ plant, built during the First Five-Year Plan, which brought hordes of peasants to the city of Nizhnii Novgorod to live and work, turning the medieval town into what Siegelbaum dubs a ‘Soviet Detroit’; and third, the factory and city of Togliatti, a product of the Brezhnev era, which was built to meet the growing thirst for passenger cars. In Siegelbaum's account, the fate of the automobile sector reflected the bind in which Soviet industry so often found itself: reliant on technology developed in America and Europe, the Soviet regime entered into agreements with private companies to bring expertise, patents, and parts; yet as the 1930s progressed and Soviet patriotism grew more pronounced (and more paranoid) this dependency on outside aid rankled, and, by 1937, managers and engineers who had worked closely with foreign partners became targets of suspicion, falling victim to the Great Terror. Even in the post-war period such difficulties continued, and when the regime came to build the Togliatti plant it once more relied on foreign expertise—this time signing a massive deal with Fiat. The Soviet automobile industry certainly expanded massively over the seventy-four years of its history but it never escaped the shadow of other more developed economies, and, by the 1980s at least, the auto-towns, rather than being the hoped-for havens of socialist living, had become hotbeds of theft, alcoholism, overcrowding, and poverty

Communism · Economic history · Factory (object-oriented programming · Individualism · Political science · Symbol (formal · Truck · Engineering · German History and Society · History · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies · Law

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