So a guy in Soviet Russia wants to buy a car. He goes to the dealership, and the dealer tells him there's a ten-year waiting list. The guy puts some money down, then asks, morning or afternoon? Ten years away, the dealer says. What does it matter? Well, the plumber's coming in the morning.
The joke still works because almost every American and European walks onto a lot and drives off the same day. Competition pushes companies to sell us the newest, fastest, safest toys. Take that incentive away and the pressure to innovate looks very different. From 1922 to 1990 the USSR held sway over 8.6 million square miles, and its first serious attempt at a purely Soviet car came from the works that later became AMO.
In 1927 engineers rolled out the NAMI-1, pitched as a cross between a cycle car's simplicity and a small sedan's room. It handled broken cobbles and forest tracks pretty well, yet the price tag was so high that production trickled to a few thousand units. In the end the plants switched to trucks and then to tanks. When peace returned, the industry simply reused foreign designs.
Drivetrains were simplified, suspension hardened. A British Ford Prefect was measured, redrawn in metric, bolted together with locally available steel, and released as the KIM-10. For Soviet drivers it felt light-years ahead, which says more about the depths it was climbing out of than any real edge it held over the West.
Moskvich, "native of Moscow," moved faster. After the fall of the Nazis the Soviets dismantled Opel's Kadett works in Germany and shipped it east. In 1947 the Moskvich 400 appeared. Kadett silhouette, 23 horsepower, zero-to-sixty in 55 seconds, and still praised as the best thing you could buy. By the 1950s the USSR was exporting the same models. Production finally spiked.
You might know VAZ by its export badge, Lada. In the seventies the 2101 looked like a Fiat 124 sedan that had been lifting weights. Drum brakes grown large, ground clearance lifted, sheet metal thickened, trim deleted. Mechanics in any village could fix one with a wrench, a length of wire, and a bit of patience.
Back home the showroom was more an idea than a place. Military needs devoured steel, rubber and magnesium first. What was left went to factories in tiny batches. Around four and a half percent of citizens ever owned a car. The decision was handed down through the trade union attached to your employer, and the paperwork was personal. You wrote an application explaining why the state should let you borrow a car long enough to buy it. A year later you were judged on output, attendance at meetings, party loyalty, even how often you volunteered for overtime on Saturday. Derek from shipping got the last slot while you were still waiting year seven.
Money could not shorten the queue, but it could let you jump to a different list. The Volga M21 was reserved for directors, air-force colonels, Olympic heroes, or whoever the KGB felt deserved a carrot. The ordinary model came with a radio and a cigarette lighter. The secret-police variant received a five-and-a-half litre V8 and a speedometer that stopped lying at 110 mph.
Practicality ruled everywhere except one small corner of East Germany. The Melkus RS-1000 looked like a Lotus that had lost weight and mislaid two cylinders. Its gullwing doors and fibreglass body wrapped around a three-cylinder two-stroke engine, giving the whole car the soul of a chainsaw and the top speed to match.
In the end the engineers were clever enough, the workers diligent enough, yet the incentives pointed the wrong way. Factories copied, quotas ruled, tanks came first, and the best machines went to the leading class. The cars rolled, but they rolled within a system that had quietly reinvented the class divide it claimed to have erased.