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.
Tabella dei contenuti
Introduction
by Lewis H. Siegelbaum Part One: Socialist Cars and Systems of Production, Distribution, and Consumption 1. The Elusive People’s Car: Imagined Automobility and Productive Practices along the ‘Czechoslovak Road to Socialism’ (1945–1968)
by Valentina Fava2. Cars as Favors in People’s Poland
by Mariusz Jastrzab3. Alternative Modernity? Everyday Practices of Elite Mobility in Communist Hungary, 1956–1980
by György Péteri Part Two: Mobility and Socialist Cities 4. Planning for Mobility: Designing City Centers and New Towns in the USSR and the GDR in the 1960s
by Elke Beyer5. Automobility in Yugoslavia between Urban Planner, Market, and Motorist: The Case of Belgrade, 1945–1972
by Brigitte Le Normand6. On the Streets of a Truck-Building City: Naberezhnye Chelny in the Brezhnev Era
by Esther Meier7. Understanding a Car in the Context of a System: Trabants, Marzahn, and East German Socialism
by Eli Rubin Part Three: Socialist Car Cultures and Automobility 8. The Common Heritage of the Socialist Car Culture
by Luminita Gatejel9. Autobasteln: Modifying, Maintaining, and Repairing Private Cars in the GDR, 1970–1990
by Kurt Möser10. ‘Little Tsars of the Road’: Soviet Truck Drivers and Automobility, 1920s–1980s
by Lewis H. Siegelbaum11. Women and Cars in Soviet and Russian Society
by Corinna Kuhr-KorolevNotes
Notes on Contributors
Index
Circa l’autore
Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of several books, including Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile, also from Cornell, and the editor most recently of Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia.
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