Trucks of the Soviet Union
Trucks of the Soviet Union

Author: Andy Thompson

Publisher: Behemoth Publishing

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780992876951

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When the Communists raised the red flag over Russia in October 1917, they inherited a country with virtually no truck industry. Britain, Germany, America and France had factories mass producing trucks; the Russians had a few tiny assembly plants, bolting together imported components. By the time of the Soviet Union's demise at the end of 1991, its engineers, designers and workers had created one of the world's largest truck industries. To do that, they had faced and overcome huge challenges. The Soviet Union's communist system was the world's first attempt to create a new type of society, one that rejected the often chaotic and unstable rules of capitalism. For more than seventy years, trucks in the Soviet Union were designed and built to be part of a vast planned and ordered transport system, interacting rather than competing with trains and waterways. Each factory built specific trucks with their own roles to play in the grand design of the planned economy. Politics and revolutionary expediency were never far from the design studio, or the shop floor, making this a story as much about a nation as it is about an industry. The vast natural environment also played its part. Soviet truckers were faced with driving huge distances across a landscape that included some of the coldest and hottest places on earth, a country that spanned Europe and Asia, the Artic Circle and the Caucasus region. Service stations and motorways were few and far between in such a huge country, making reliability and serviceability far more important than driver comfort. Trucks of the Soviet Unionrecounts how the truck industry helped build Soviet industrial might, shares the chaos and pain those proud truck makers suffered after the hammer and sickle was hauled down from the Kremlin flag poles and reveals the newly confident and buoyant truck industry that has risen from its post-Communist ashes to become a part of a newly resurgent Russia.

Cars of the Soviet Union
Cars of the Soviet Union

Author: Andy Thompson

Publisher: Behemoth Publishing

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780992876982

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Extraordinarily detailed and fully illustrated, this is the story of Soviet cars from the birth of the Soviet Union in 1917 until its demise in 1991, including a chapter dedicated to the post-Soviet era. It is the story of an insular, state-run car industry in which the carefully thought-out ideas of ministerial planners, rather than the fickle nature of customers in a free market, determined what cars were made. The cars of the Soviet Union therefore have a unique heritage: designed for a social purpose, influenced by politicians, built with military needs in mind and sold in a country where the open road could be a 300-mile track across a windswept steppe. This is a fascinating book, full of rarely seen photographs and illustrations, largely in colour, that will interest classic car enthusiasts everywhere.

Cars for Comrades
Cars for Comrades

Author: Lewis H. Siegelbaum

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-08-15

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0801461480

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The automobile and Soviet communism made an odd couple. The quintessential symbol of American economic might and consumerism never achieved iconic status as an engine of Communist progress, in part because it posed an awkward challenge to some basic assumptions of Soviet ideology and practice. In this rich and often witty book, Lewis H. Siegelbaum recounts the life of the Soviet automobile and in the process gives us a fresh perspective on the history and fate of the USSR itself. Based on sources ranging from official state archives to cartoons, car-enthusiast magazines, and popular films, Cars for Comrades takes us from the construction of the huge "Soviet Detroits," emblems of the utopian phase of Soviet planning, to present-day Togliatti, where the fate of Russia's last auto plant hangs in the balance. The large role played by American businessmen and engineers in the checkered history of Soviet automobile manufacture is one of the book's surprises, and the author points up the ironic parallels between the Soviet story and the decline of the American Detroit. In the interwar years, automobile clubs, car magazines, and the popularity of rally races were signs of a nascent Soviet car culture, its growth slowed by the policies of the Stalinist state and by Russia's intractable "roadlessness." In the postwar years cars appeared with greater frequency in songs, movies, novels, and in propaganda that promised to do better than car-crazy America. Ultimately, Siegelbaum shows, the automobile epitomized and exacerbated the contradictions between what Soviet communism encouraged and what it provided. To need a car was a mark of support for industrial goals; to want a car for its own sake was something else entirely. Because Soviet cars were both hard to get and chronically unreliable, and such items as gasoline and spare parts so scarce, owning and maintaining them enmeshed citizens in networks of private, semi-illegal, and ideologically heterodox practices that the state was helpless to combat. Deeply researched and engagingly told, this masterful and entertaining biography of the Soviet automobile provides a new perspective on one of the twentieth century's most iconic—and important—technologies and a novel approach to understanding the history of the Soviet Union itself.

The Socialist Car
The Socialist Car

Author: Lewis H. Siegelbaum

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0801463211

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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.

U.S. Army Chevrolet Trucks in World War II
U.S. Army Chevrolet Trucks in World War II

Author: Didier Andres

Publisher: Casemate

Published: 2020-04-30

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 161200864X

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A detailed, pictorial history of the 1 1/2-ton Chevy truck and its use by the U.S. Army during World War II. From 1940 to 1945, large numbers of trucks of all categories were delivered to the U.S. Army by the Chevrolet Motor Division of General Motors. Over 160,000 of these trucks were G-506 light four-wheel-drive trucks—which became the standard 1 1/2-ton, 4x4 truck for both the U.S. Army and Army Air Corps during the war. In addition, many more thousands were delivered to Allied forces as part of the Lend-Lease program, including nearly 50,000 delivered to the Soviet Union. Tough, well-built, and more agile than the deuce and a half, the Chevy 11⁄2 ton played a part in every theater of operations during the war. Its durability and mechanical reliability made it ideal for a wide range of missions. Not for nothing did Chevy advertise the trucks during the war as “Vehicles of Victory.” More than 75 years after it was designed, the small Chevrolet truck is still a favorite with collectors. This fully illustrated book details the different series of trucks and their many uses within the U.S. Army including cargo trucks, panel delivery trucks for the Signal Corps, dump trucks for engineers, telephone trucks, tractors, and bomb service trucks for the air force. It also covers their part in the Lend-Lease program, and their continued use after the war.

Red Steel
Red Steel

Author: Russell Phillips

Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub

Published: 2013-04

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 9781482694208

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The Cold War never heated up, but if it had, the Soviet Union was ready. This reference work details 73 major Soviet war machines, from the 2P26 "Baby Carriage" - a deceptively light, Jeep-like vehicle mounting four anti-tank missiles - to the T-80U main battle tank with its advanced armour and electronic countermeasures. Sixty-one photographs and drawings illustrate the work, and access to a web gallery with even more illustrations is included in the purchase.

Soviet Cold War Weaponry
Soviet Cold War Weaponry

Author: Anthony Tucker-Jones

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2015-05-20

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1473862744

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The T-54, T-62 and T-72 main battle tanks along with the personnel carriers, assault guns, self-propelled guns and anti-tank missiles that are illustrated in this photographic history represent the high point in the design and manufacture of armoured vehicles by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Although the superpowers never came to blows, the 'Cold War' was far from cold, as numerous 'hot' proxy wars were fought in Africa and the Middle East, and these conflicts employed the Soviet weaponry that is shown in action in the colour and black-and-white photographs selected for this book.Between the 1950s and 1980s Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries produced thousands of tanks and armoured vehicles ready for the Third World War. They embarked on a technological arms race with the NATO allies in an attempt to counter each new piece of equipment as it appeared in service. Much of this Soviet weaponry has achieved almost iconic status and, despite its age, remains in service with armies, guerrilla forces and terrorist organizations around the world today. It is also of enduring interest to collectors, re-enactors and modellers who are fascinated by the military equipment of the late twentieth century.