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This book examines the place of the motor car in the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR. In particular, it considers the dynamic tension between cars and socialism, a tension that inhered in the Socialist Car. Albania under the dictator Enver Hoxha represents an extreme case in the awkward fit between cars and communism. Only Kim Il Sung’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea matched its ban on private car ownership. Elsewhere in the socialist camp the situation was more complicated yet more fascinating. This book explores how the automobile intertwines with the material cultures and consumption practices of the socialist Second World countries. It also discusses the ways that the West was implicated in the production and reception of the Socialist Car and hence of the Eastern Bloc’s aspiration for an “alternative modernity,” a relationship theorized by Michael David-Fox as a transnational history of “entangled modernities.” Finally, it looks at the socialist car from another lens: “automobility”.

This chapter examines two dominant perspectives on socialist cars, one belonging to the Cold War context and the other to post-1989 Communist nostalgia. What seems to have survived the dissolution of the former Eastern Bloc with regard to cars is either their proverbial bad reputation or a nostalgic patina retroactively added to them. This chapter first traces the parallel advancement toward mass motorization in the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and socialist Romania. It then considers the car as a vehicle of socialism, with particular emphasis on the characteristic features of the so-called socialist car culture as well as the national context and the specific conditions that allowed mass motorization to spread throughout the entire Eastern Bloc. It also explores various constructions of the Socialist Car and how it gave rise to identical discourses and inspired similar popular cultural movements in all three countries. Finally, it discusses the integrative function of the consumption and social policies of the 1960s and 1970s that homogenized socialist societies.

This chapter examines how cars in Poland came to be granted as favors for loyal or exceptionally useful subjects by those in authority. Using two sets of archival documents from 1977–1980 and 1983–1985, it discusses the practice of automobile distributive decisions at the governmental level. The chapter first provides an overview of automobile production and distribution in Poland before discussing the mechanisms of allocating cars to private individuals in a governmental institution and shows that the process of making those decisions was characterized by a lack of formalized rules of behavior. Cars were given to people with certain ties to decision makers, and car ownership became an indicator of social status. Officials who allocated cars received demonstrations of submission, gratitude and loyalty, or, in some cases, personal services in return. The chapter also considers how Western automotive makers such as Fiat Company not only provided an essential shortcut to the production of the Socialist Car but also offered hopes for material advancement, modernity, and comfort.

This chapter examines the symbolic significance of streets, and how people took possession of them, in the Soviet city of Naberezhnye Chelny during the Brezhnev era. Naberezhnye Chelny was designed to be a model city of the future. It was intented to make good, in urban planning terms, on the promises given by the political leadership to the workers in return for their participation in this large project. These promises included a car and an apartment, education, vacation time, and recreation. The chapter first provides a background on truck factory KamAZ and Naberezhnye Chelny before focusing on the vehicles—streetcars, buses, trucks, and cars—that traveled the city streets. It then considers the public transportation system in Naberezhnye Chelny and the extent to which the use of private vehicles was taken into account in the planning of the city. It shows that traffic planning did not assign preferential status to the Socialist Car over buses and the streetcar, and suggests that automobility failed to appear in provincial towns such as Naberezhnye Chelny during the Brezhnev era.

This chapter examines the Trabant, the quintessential socialist car in East Germany, not so much as an automobile unto itself but as a system unto itself and a part of a larger system of movement. The Trabant is probably the most potent symbol of Ostalgie—that wave of longing for the return of certain aspects of the German Democratic Republic that swept former East Germans and even West Germans in the two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Before 1989, the Trabant—with its two-stroke engine, plastic fiberglass body, and terrible quality—was for many West Germans, and Westerners in general, the most potent symbol of socialism’s incompetence and inferiority in comparison with their own world. The East German state folded the Trabant and the street more generally into what they termed Bewegungssystem (system of movement). Focusing on Berlin-Marzahn, a housing settlement in far northeast Berlin, this chapter considers the Trabant within the context of utopian urban planning that sought to transform the East German urban, semiurban, and rural landscape.