East European cars are generally derided in the West as cheap, low-quality rustbuckets. This title aims to dig deeper, covering almost all the vehicles produced from the end of the Second World War to the end of the 20th century from the most basic three-wheeler from Czechosolovakia to the big V8 limousines of Russian and China. Many Soviet bloc cars were never exported to the West so there are many unfamiliar marques such as the Zil, Chaika, Syrena and Tatra. These are covered along with the better known Skoda, Lada and Trabant, including Soviet land-speed records and prototypes.
Cars of Eastern Europe tells the story of the cars and vans made in Latvia, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany. In a region that stretches from the Black Sea to the Baltic, the vehicles were as varied as the nations themselves. Now that eastern Europe has come in from the cold, this book offers a unique and timely survey of the motor industry in this often overlooked part of the continent.
In the fast-growing East European economies, a parti cularly important role falls to the transport systems that are called upon to move an ever-rising volume of goods and a con stantly increasing number of passengers. Gaining new insights into the problems that face those transport systems, into their achievements, and into some still unanswered questions is therefore highly interesting and--in terms of world experience --essential. The transportation systems of Eastern Europe operate within a centrally planned environment, but they serve dif ferent types of economies, from highly advanced East Germany and Czechoslovakia to the still industrializing Romania and Bulgaria. They have to satisfy fairly diversified transport needs: they operate within systems that have adopted different scales of political and economic priorities and different methods and forms of achieving them politically--from the faithful Soviet shadow-state of East Germany to the indepen dence-seeking Romania and Yugoslavia and, economically, from the traditionally strict authoritarian form of Romania that seeks industrialization and state power to the New Economic Mechanism of Hungary and the decentralization of Yugoslavia. Also, unlike the Soviet Union, the East European transport sys tems cover relatively small territories whose external connec tions differ from one another in scope and in modes. In addi tion, the transport systems of Eastern Europe have been called upon to accomplish feats of steeply rising performance with x infrastructures and equipment supported by miserly allocations.
This book, first published in 1983, goes beyond the ‘black and white’ literature of many East–West observers to offer a more nuanced assessment of the achievements of the Eastern bloc countries of the early 1980s. It covers the emergence of ‘Eastern Europe’ from revolution and war, the politics and economics of the new countries and their relationships with the West.
Originally published in 1985, this book considers many important aspects of the transport systems of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It looks at the different modes of transport and the problems faced by each. Examining the relationship between transport problems and those of poor economic performance against the possibilities of economic reform the book analyses some of the measures which were taken to remedy the situation.
