She has just turned 50 and has had some moments on the road; however, as the Lada enters its moment for part of a century, it still has its faithful admirers.
Fans of the old Soviet car, first produced in 1970, piled up on September 12 in the shadow of the Kremlin for a rally to celebrate this pillar of the socialist car.
Some came here dressed as periods in Soviet history, a tribute to Lada’s own role in the lives of millions of people living on the territory of the former USSR and beyond.
Owned by Lada: the dream of the Soviet driver
The Lada first took to the road in 1970 and has temporarily become an object of wonderful desire. But the planned economy of the Soviet era was not designed to meet customer demand. A user can wait years to get the car out of their dreams.
Once they did, they loved it. While cars themselves were scarce, spare portions were, and as in many other parts of the world, stealing anything that can be disposed of from a parked vehicle is a risk.
In the Soviet Union, this included the rubber sheets of the windshield wipers. They kept inside the car and settled in only when needed. One of the memories of writers at the end of the Soviet era is watching motorists jumping from cars stuck in traffic to adapt the brooms to their windshield wipers when a summer storm broke out on the streets of Moscow.
Take a seat for imported cars?
Appreciated as they once were, the end of the Soviet formula followed a sure break of love with Ladas. In the 1990s, Russia opened its borders and economy to unprecedented quantities of Western customer products, adding automobiles.
Where the overwhelming majority of cars on Soviet roads were ever manufactured in the USSR, this percentage decreased as drivers took the wheels off a variety of imported logos. In 2014, as reported in that year’s Moscow Times, “only one in 20 Lada homeowners said they would give the car logo to their friends or colleagues. “
Ladas also emerged from discontent in foreign markets where they had controlled to identify themselves. The Independent reported in 2018 that there were only 179 on British roads, for example, compared to 130,000 in the 1990s. However, a more recent article by The Guardian, he highlighted the great popularity of lada in Cuba, where he had been brought decades of socialist solidarity in the last century.
Why Russia Loves the Lada
Regardless of what the motorists surveyed in 2014 say, Lada still states “more than 20% of the percentage of passenger car market in Russia,” according to the press covering its August 2020 sales.
So why does Russia still love the Lada? Any car that exceeds 50 years of Russia’s harsh winters and Russia’s infamous bumpy roads will earn notorious respect.
There’s something else, too. A poll published in March 2020 through the Levada Center reported that 75% of Russians believe that the Soviet era is the most productive time in their country’s history (although only 28% sought to “go back the way the Soviet Union followed”). Three decades after the collapse of the communist system, Russia still has some nostalgia for its Soviet past.
The love for the Lada, the ultimate symbol of the Soviet car, is one to enjoy this.
I’m from “Moscow Assignment: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin” (published in the United States and the United Kingdom in July 2020) and 3 other books on
I’m from “Moscow Assignment: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin” (published in the United States and the United Kingdom in July 2020) and 3 other books on foreign affairs. I visited the Soviet Union for the first time as a language student in the 1980s. Since then, I have been following the adjustments in Russia’s political, social and economic life. I spent many years living and reporting in Moscow, where between 1991 and 2009 I published twice for the BBC and once for Reuters TV. My career as a correspondent also included assignments in Brussels and the Middle East. I am now a reader (associate professor) of foreign journalism at the City, University of London. I speak Russian and French fluently and some Danish.