Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960s until the collapse of
communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the
ideological imperatives of political authorities and the
aspirations of ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile
was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined
consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal
car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic
assumptions of the collectivity. The "socialist car" and the car
culture that built up around it was the result of an always
unstable compromise between official ideology, available resources,
and the desires of an increasingly restless citizenry. In The
Socialist Car, eleven scholars from Europe and North America
explore in vivid detail the interface between the motorcar and the
state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the
USSR.
In addition to the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from
which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant but aging
models were fabricated, the socialist car embodied East Europeans'
longings and compromises, hopes and disappointments. The socialist
car represented both aspirations of overcoming the technological
gap between the capitalist first and socialist second worlds and
dreams of enhancing personal mobility and status. Certain features
of automobility shortages and privileges, waiting lists and lack of
readily available credit, the inadequacy of streets and highways
prevailed across the Soviet Bloc. In this collective history, the
authors put aside both ridicule and nostalgia in the interest of
trying to understand the socialist car in its own context.
Contributors: Elke Beyer, Swiss Institute of Technology;
Valentina Fava, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and
University of Helsinki; Luminita Gatejel, European University
Institute, Florence; Mariusz Jastrzab, Kozminski University;
Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, University of Bochum; Brigitte Le Normand,
Indiana University Southeast; Esther Meier, University of the
Federal Armed Forces, Hamburg; Kurt Moser, Karlsruhe Institute of
Technology; Gyorgy Peteri, Norwegian University of Science and
Technology, Trondheim; Eli Rubin, Western Michigan University;
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Michigan State University"
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