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VAZ-2121-Niva.jpg

I have recently been reading Lewis H. Siegelbaum, *Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile* and rereading Andy Thompson's *Cars of the Soviet Union: The Definitive History* (both books are from 2008). Both of them raise the interesting question: Could Soviet cars ever have sold well in the US? For a while, during the heyday of detente in the mid-1970's it seemed possible:

"The one country where Ladas did not travel was the United States, *though it was a close thing.* [my emphasis--DT] In May 1975, American newspapers reported under the headline 'Russia May Sell Car Here' that if a deal then in the works came to fruition, as many as ten thousand Ladas could be sold annually. Alarmed by the prospect, John Ashbrook, a Republican congressman from Ohio, had a statement entered into the Congressional Record that read in part: 'bout the last thing the U.S. needs right now is a Soviet manufactured car...Auto sales of American-made cars are already far below normal. Thousands of auto workers have been thrown out of work. We cannot afford to have U.S. markets flooded with cheap, state-produced products.' Ashbrook, who died in 1982 after serving in Congress for twenty-two years, lived just long enough to witness the 'invasion' of cheap, non-state-produced Japanese cars. It would be another three years before Malcolm Bricklin succeeded in importing the Yugo, Lada's distant cousin from Yugoslavia.." *Cars for Comrades,* p. 102 https://books.google.com/books?id=Aksy4KQ-zVYC&pg=PT76

Thompson writes (*Cars of the Soviet Union,* p. 111):

"Production of right-hand drive 1,198 cc models--the VAZ 21012 saloon and VAZ 21014 estate--started on 22 May 1973 with exports planned to Japan, Australia and, what was to prove one of Lada's most successful export markets, Britain. In the same year a VAZ 2102 estate car and a top-line VAZ 2103 were exhibited alognside a UAZ 469 in New York. However, no sales to America ever took place--detente didn't extend as far as the motor industry. Canadian sales started in 1978 and some Canadian drivers reported difficulties getting petrol in parts of the USA when patriotic American service station attendants wouldn't serve fuel to a 'commie car'!..."

According to the USSR Facts and Figures Manual (1980), "the Lada is scheduled for distribution in the US in 1980."
http://books.google.com/books?um=1&q="lada+is+scheduled+for+distribution" Obviously, that didn't work out; for one thing, by that time detente was dead. But is there any way that if it lasted it could "extend as far as the motor industry"?

FWIW, the Lada seems to have been marketed quite effectively in many Western countries, especially the UK. Admittedly, perhaps the biggest selling point was that it was cheap, but it is hard to believe that this would not also appeal to some Americans:

"Sales of the new car [the VAZ 2105. known in Britain as the Lada Riva, a re-design of the older Fiat-based Zhiguli] in export markets were extremely successful, building on Lada's reputation as a maker of solid, unpretentious cars for motorists who wanted to drive on a budget. Lada introduced the new car to Canada, building on its entry to that market in 1978 with the VAZ 21061, sold as the Lada 1500. It was also popular in Finland and Holland...and as far away as New Zealand.

"Britain in particular became a very lucrative market for Ladas. Sales in the 1980s rocketed, especially in the North and the Midlands. A Lada was, for many working people, their only chance of buying a new car. Redundancy payments from the Government-inspired closure of Britain's industrial heartland--including its car industry--and the additional disposable income people found bybuying their council houses for monthly payments that were less than the rent, all helped provide a market for the Lada.

"Lada's marketing campaigns were cleverly pitched at this target working-class market. Tag lines included 'The economy car that doesn't cut corners' and 'Tough cars. Tame prices.' *Autocar*'s road test of the Lada Riva 1300 in January 1984 was quite clear: 'We reckon that for most potential owners the pros and cons are largely outweighed by that low price tag. There is no doubt that the Lada Riva ofers reasonable motoring at an affordable price.' Later that year it also put the more expensive VAZ Lada Riva 1500 GLS through its paces. It felt pretty much the same about the more expensive car as it did about the cheaper model, criticizing its heavy controls and general lack of refinement but praising it for being a straightforward, well-equipped car that offered good value for money." Andy Thompson, *Cars of the Soviet Union*, pp.229-30.

Thompson does note that comedians liked to joke about the Lada (Q: What do you call a Lada at the top of a hill? A: A miracle) but adds (pp. 232-235) "the joke, however, was on those in the motor trade who hadn't the foresight to get themselves signed up with Lada. During the heady days of the late 1980s, British Lada dealers had one of the most profitable franchises in the industry, with 20,000 a year rolling out of the showroom doors by 1986. The new Riva range was introduced gradually with each variant arriving a couple of years after its home-market launch, providing the dealers with a steady flow of products that they could sell without having to invest in state-of-the-art, glass-and-chrome showrooms. In 1988 sales were even higher--30,000 budget-conscious motorists bought the company's cars, mostly the bargain-basment Riva, though the front-wheel-drive VAZ 2108 Samara was also starting to gain fans. The VAZ 2121 Niva [see attached photo--DT] had made its mark, too, being without any effective competition for a compact, low-cost yet civilised four-wheel-drive car..."

Now maybe America did not proportionately have as many of the budget-conscious working-class drivers who made the Lada so successful in Britain, but I doubt that it totally lacked this kind of driver. And even if one says Lada's success in the UK was atypical, one would have to explain why it sold well enough in some other Western countries as well, including Canada-- a country whose taste in cars, while not identical to that of the US, would seem closer to the US than to, say, the UK.

From a 1984 Popular Mechanuics article on "The Canadian Connection: Cars You Can't Buy Here"
http://books.google.com/books?id=yeMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA62

"The best seller in this troika of comrade cars is the Russian-built Fiat-based Lada, with 50,000 units sold since its debut in 1979. Its Russian engineers have retained the worst features of the Fiat 124--the long-arm, short-leg gorilla driving position and the spotty reliability record--and added a few of their own. The rough and noisy engine seems better suited to an Order of Lenin tractor. The steering gear would give Arnold Schwarzenegger pause. Still, by communist standards, the Lada is Mercedez-Benz.

"Lada also imports the cute, rugged but rough-running four-wheel-drive Niva. Rumor has it that Porsche had a hand in the design of this rig, but nobody's talking....the Niva will take you just about anywhere, providing it doesn't make you deaf first.

"In case you're wondering about the political ramifications of selling Russian cars in Canada, you should know that the importing company is wholly Canadian. It is also involved in arranging other trade deals between Canada and the Soviet Union.

"Understand that Russia is no more popular in Canada than in the United States. We see our share of bumper stickers reading 'Tour Afghanistan--Buy a Lada.'"

Still, with all those things working against it, the Lada had, as the article stated, sold 50,000 units from 1979 to 1984, and given that Canada's population is only about one-tenth of the US that would translate into something like 500,000 in the US. Also, the later front-wheel-drive Lada Samara, according to Andy Thompson (*Cars of the Soviet Union*, p. 260) was "sold reasonably successfully in Australia and Canada." As he noted, it sold best in areas "where rugged ability to get the job done was perhaps more of a buying factor than the smoothest ride and the finest interior trim mouldings." There are many such areas in Australia and Canada, to be sure, but are there not also some in the US?

In short, the Canadian experience makes me a little bit skeptical of arguments that the Lada could never have caught on in the US.

(It is true that Soviet cars had a bad reputation in eastern Europe [1], not necessarily entirely for political reasons. "Hüte Dich vor blonden Frauen/ und Autos, die die Russen bauen..." ran an East German proverb--"Beware of blonde women, and cars built by Russians." But one should note regarding East-bloc dissatisfaction with Soviet-made autos, that the ones sold in the West were not necessarily identical to the ones sold in the USSR or East-bloc countries. Thompson observes for example at p. 226 that "The British importer created its own version of the VAZ 2106, the Lada 1600ES. Much of the additional equipment, such as the alloy wheels and the vinyl roof, was added to the cars once they had arrived in the United Kingdom.")

[1] "Elsewhere in Europe [i.e., outside the East-bloc--DT] their appeal varied. In Finland the Lada's heyday was in the 1970s when its price, compared with imports from elsewhere in Europe, was unbeatable and the postwar generation was experiencing unprecedented opportunities of automobility. 'By the early eighties at the latest,' writes Jukka Gronow, 'Lada was not any more to be recommended.' The reason was not a decline in quality but rather that by that time Lada's Western and Japanese competitors, 'the unspoken points of comrparison in [technical] reports, had run far ahead.' In Britain, by contrast, the mid-to-late-1980s seems to have been the peak period of the Lada's appeal, coinciding with the Thatcherite boom, when 'the newly consumerized working classes, heady with the equity that came from council-house saies and the promise of the ready credit that property ownership could guarantee, bought them 'in embarrassingly large numbers.' High running-and-repair costs, and eventually, emission-control regulations did them in." Sigelbaum, *Cars for Comrades,* p. 102.

BTW, the Lada wasn't the first Soviet car to be popular in Finland, as a Finnish friend of mine once noted:

"Not just the Lada. Pobeda GAZ-M3 was extremely popular in Finland back in the late 1950s. If you had to hail a cab in downtown Helsinki, chances are that a Pobeda would show up; approximately 70% of the Finnish taxis were GAZ-M3. By the sixties, it was replaced by the equally ubiquitous Volga M-21, but by then, Western cars were already freely available in the market, and it quickly lost ground to the Mercedes...

"Whatever else may be said, the fact is that Lada was a good car for wintertime roads. That definitely explained its popularity in Finland, where it was very often bought as a 'wintertime car'. I'd imagine that this was probably a factor also in Canada. Perhaps in the United States, the Lada could have plausibly gained popularity in the northernmost states, for this same reason?...

"Of course, although the machine was good enough, the Soviet-made electrical system and dashboard instruments could often provide you with, well, interesting experiences. When a light switched on, you could never be _really_ sure what it meant.

"Samara was also a very good wintertime car. The problem was that although it was an improvement after the old Zhigulis, VAZ-2108 was still butt ugly. We had a slightly better VAZ-2109 when I was young in the late '80s, and at the time, it was probably the only Soviet car model you _didn't_ have to feel embarrassed about owning. Although its popularity did not last too long, and even in our family, it was soon replaced by an Opel Kadett E, probably the most ubiquitous European working/middle-class car of the '80s." https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/etJGDyZqqHI/YcGSm-dKKh8J
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