The socialist car : automobility in the Eastern Bloc / Lewis H. Siegelbaum, editor.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Siegelbaum, Lewis H.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Automobiles--Social aspects--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century.

Automobiles.

Automobiles--Social aspects--Soviet Union--History.

Automobile industry and trade--Social aspects--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century.

Automobile industry and trade.

Automobile industry and trade--Social aspects--Soviet Union--History.

Socialism and culture--Europe, Eastern--History--20th century.

Socialism and culture.

Socialism and culture--Soviet Union--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (253 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960's 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.

Contents:

The elusive people's car : imagined automobility and productive practices along the "Czechoslovak road to socialism" (1945-1968) / Valentina Fava

Cars as favors in people's Poland / Mariusz Jastrząb

Alternative modernity? : everyday practices of elite mobility in communist Hungary, 1956-1980 / György Péteri

Planning for mobility : designing city centers and new towns in the USSR and the GDR in the 1960s / Elke Beyer

Automobility in Yugoslavia between urban planner, market, and motorist : the case of Belgrade, 1945-1972 / Brigitte Le Normand

On the streets of a truck-building city : Naberezhnye Chelny in the Brezhnev era / Esther Meier

Understanding a car in the context of a system : Trabants, Marzahn, and East German socialism / Eli Rubin

The common heritage of the socialist car culture / Luminita Gatejel

Autobasteln : modifying, maintaining, and repairing private cars in the GDR, 1970-1990 / Kurt Möser

"Little tsars of the road" : Soviet truck drivers and automobility, 1920s-1980s / Lewis H. Siegelbaum

Women and cars in Soviet and Russian society / Corinna Kuhr-Korolev.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780801463228

080146322X

9781322504476

1322504474

9780801463211

0801463211

OCLC:

842112108