Socialist Car

Automobility in the Eastern Bloc

Häftad, Engelska, 2011

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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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2011-10-15
Mått155 x 235 x 16 mm
Vikt454 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor256
FörlagCornell University Press
ISBN9780801477386

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Introductionby Lewis H. SiegelbaumPart One: Socialist Cars and Systems of Production, Distribution, and Consumption1. The Elusive People's Car: Imagined Automobility and Productive Practices along the "Czechoslovak Road to Socialism" (1945–1968)by Valentina Fava2. Cars as Favors in People's Polandby Mariusz Jastrzab3. Alternative Modernity? Everyday Practices of Elite Mobility in Communist Hungary, 1956–1980by György PéteriPart Two: Mobility and Socialist Cities4. Planning for Mobility: Designing City Centers and New Towns in the USSR and the GDR in the 1960sby Elke Beyer5. Automobility in Yugoslavia between Urban Planner, Market, and Motorist: The Case of Belgrade, 1945–1972by Brigitte Le Normand6. On the Streets of a Truck-Building City: Naberezhnye Chelny in the Brezhnev Eraby Esther Meier7. Understanding a Car in the Context of a System: Trabants, Marzahn, and East German Socialismby Eli RubinPart Three: Socialist Car Cultures and Automobility8. The Common Heritage of the Socialist Car Cultureby Luminita Gatejel9. Autobasteln: Modifying, Maintaining, and Repairing Private Cars in the GDR, 1970–1990by Kurt Möser10. "Little Tsars of the Road": Soviet Truck Drivers and Automobility, 1920s–1980sby Lewis H. Siegelbaum11. Women and Cars in Soviet and Russian Societyby Corinna Kuhr-KorolevNotesNotes on ContributorsIndex

[These] essays are of a high standard and together provide us with an excellent resource for car cultures under twentieth-century socialist regimes.... [They] would make an excellent addition to any reading list concerned with modern Eastern Europe, material culture, and automobility.- Zachary Doleshal (H-German) As is clear from the eleven chapters covering more than six countries, there was no single consensus on how to reconcile consumers' desires for individual mobility with the ideological demands of collectivity... Together, the essays in this volume both explain and complicate commonly held notions about the deficiencies of consumer goods in the Eastern Bloc. The Socialist Car fills a noticeable gap in comparative studies of consumer culture as well as automobility, and will be of interest to scholars well beyond historians of Eastern Europe.- Sally West (Canadian-American Slavic Studies) Cars offer a fascinating prism through which to explore the socialist society that materialized in the Eastern Bloc after 1917.... The sociological and cultural approaches one might take in regard to the automobile are numerous and diverse and The Socialist Car does not disappoint.- Tim Harte (Slavic and East European Journal) In this exemplary volume, the seemingly narrow topic of automobility in the Eastern Bloc becomes a window into aspects of history as varied as factory production, Communist Party politics, urban planning, and the domestic lives of women.... The everyday experiences of European socialism really come alive in these pages as the singular attention to the car allows the era's larger social, economic, and political issues to be highlighted and interrogated in multiple, convincing ways.- Kimberly Elman Zarecor (Technology and Culture) Lewis H. Siegelbaum is well placed to lead the exploration of socialist automobility.. As a result, this collection of essays edited by Siegelbaum offers many insights on lived socialism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, especially in the post-Stalin era. The essays are diverse in their approachs and sources, which range from popular culture, cinema, and archival records to oral history.. The book, which is engaging and full of telling anectodes about lived socialism, is a valuable contribution not only to the historiography of the region but also to studies of automobility cultures worldwide.- Natalya Chernyshova (Journal of Modern History) These fine essays show that a clash of civilizations can play out in the everyday commodities such as cars. Automobility as it manifested under Socialism proves to be an incredibly rich subject, reaching from the design of vast metropolitan areas down to ways the average car owner cared for their vehicle. Luminita Gatejel's essay on Socialist car culture describes the 'ambiguous amalgam of Socialist superiority and the painful awareness of backwardness' that the car caused the Eastern Bloc and USSR to feel.- Mike Pursley (PopMatters)