A good exam­ple of how the ideas to make a new car were born is the story of the fac­tory “Com­mu­nar”. The Min­is­ter of Car Man­u­fac­tur­ing made a call to the fac­tory where design­ers thought over the scheme of a new Ukrain­ian car and lit­er­ally said: “I heard you were going to make a spring sus­pen­sion from the “Volk­swa­gen” but I actu­ally like the Ital­ian Fiat-600”. Shortly the fac­tory com­menced the pro­duc­tion of ZAZ-965 –nearly the exact copy of the Fiat.

ZAZ-965

By the way, the next model of ZAZ was the replica of Ger­man NSU Prinz 4. This car was remem­bered by the nick­names “Soap Box” and “Big-eared”.

The car for the mid­dle class which replaced “Pobeda” was labelled  in the hon­our of the great Russ­ian river “Volga”. The design of the car was very much iden­ti­cal to the design of Ford Main­line, 1954, pur­chased by GAZ as a pat­tern along­side with Chevro­let Belair and Ply­mouth Savoy. Even before the new car was put into pro­duc­tion, the pop­u­lar Soviet mag­a­zine “Ogo­niok” awk­wardly pub­lished pic­tures of these three cars with an arro­gant head­line: “New Soviet cars for the mid­dle class”.

Volga

Despite the pop­u­lar­ity of Volk­swa­gen around the world their Soviet copy was not really pop­u­lar among the con­sumers. To pro­duce another mass car the Soviet gov­ern­ment signed the  con­tract with Ital­ian Fiat. The capac­ity of the fac­tory allowed to pro­duce about five thou­sands cars per year.

At the time, Leonid Brezh­nev was rul­ing the coun­try: he was pas­sion­ate about cars and rac­ing. In 1965 he got an exclu­sive Amer­i­can Lin­coln Con­ti­nen­tal sent to USSR right from the Car Exhi­bi­tion in New York.  The car was pur­chased by the Soviet Ambas­sador and was built by the com­pany Lehman & Peter­son. This had brought stretch lim­ou­sines into the fash­ion.  Lin­coln was sent to ZIL where the engi­neers made a copy which was sent to pro­duc­tion by the anniver­sary of the Great Octo­ber Social­is­tic Rev­o­lu­tion in 1967.  No doubt, the orig­i­nal Lin­coln was much more ele­gant and grace­ful than its replica ZIL-114.  Nev­er­the­less, the new Soviet limo was not that bad.  In early 1970s the car was redesigned, based on another Amer­i­can sam­ple. A Cadil­lac Fleet­wood 75 was turned into a ZIL-115 — to serve the aged and weak-minded Soviet leader.

Right up to the col­lapse of the USSR the Soviet car indus­try used the same pro­ce­dure of shame­less copy­ing. In order to build “Moskvich-1241″, the engi­neers slightly dis­fig­ured Chrysler 1501. Famous “Zhiguli” was copied from Nis­san Sunny 1978 although later they were slightly mod­ern­ized by the engi­neers of Porsche.

Prob­a­bly, “Niva” were the only excep­tion – it was made in a way to make peo­ple to cry. That car was ‘too-Russian’ to be good.

Related posts:

1. Soviet Cars: His­tory of the Copy-and-Paste Indus­try  —  Part 2 of 3
2. Soviet Cars: His­tory of the Copy-and-Paste Indus­try  —  Part 1 of 3
3. Soviet Auto­mo­bile Indus­try  —  Part 2 of 2
4. Best of Fall 2009
5. Soviet Auto­mo­bile Indus­try  —  Part 1 of 2

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