The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080144991X ISBN 13: 9780801449918

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080144991X
• ISBN 13: 9780801449918
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 277
• Editor: Siegelbaum Lewis H.