The automobile and Soviet communism made an odd couple. The
quintessential symbol of American economic might and consumerism
never achieved iconic status as an engine of Communist progress, in
part because it posed an awkward challenge to some basic
assumptions of Soviet ideology and practice. In this rich and often
witty book, Lewis H. Siegelbaum recounts the life of the Soviet
automobile and in the process gives us a fresh perspective on the
history and fate of the USSR itself.
Based on sources ranging from official state archives to
cartoons, car-enthusiast magazines, and popular films, Cars for
Comrades takes us from the construction of the huge "Soviet
Detroits," emblems of the utopian phase of Soviet planning, to
present-day Togliatti, where the fate of Russia's last auto plant
hangs in the balance. The large role played by American businessmen
and engineers in the checkered history of Soviet automobile
manufacture is one of the book's surprises, and the author points
up the ironic parallels between the Soviet story and the decline of
the American Detroit. In the interwar years, automobile clubs, car
magazines, and the popularity of rally races were signs of a
nascent Soviet car culture, its growth slowed by the policies of
the Stalinist state and by Russia's intractable "roadlessness." In
the postwar years cars appeared with greater frequency in songs,
movies, novels, and in propaganda that promised to do better than
car-crazy America.
Ultimately, Siegelbaum shows, the automobile epitomized and
exacerbated the contradictions between what Soviet communism
encouraged and what it provided. To need a car was a mark of
support for industrial goals; to want a car for its own sake was
something else entirely. Because Soviet cars were both hard to get
and chronically unreliable, and such items as gasoline and spare
parts so scarce, owning and maintaining them enmeshed citizens in
networks of private, semi-illegal, and ideologically heterodox
practices that the state was helpless to combat. Deeply researched
and engagingly told, this masterful and entertaining biography of
the Soviet automobile provides a new perspective on one of the
twentieth century's most iconic and important technologies and a
novel approach to understanding the history of the Soviet Union
itself."
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