Zhiguli's Birth

When I was a child, I remember reading with fascination about the cars being produced by a new factory in Tolyatti (or Togliatti, if spelled like the name of the Italian Communist Party leader for whom the city was named).

My interest was purely abstract. Of course, neither my parents nor any of their friends had a car. One of my father’s childhood friends later bought one, but, as my father explained with a hint of embarrassment, since his friend was an actor who had to travel from performance to performance, he really needed a car. The idea that someone might own a car just to go to work or a country home was unthinkable back then. We did, however, know another family that owned a Volga, but they were obviously no ordinary family. The father had even been abroad several times. There was a toy gondola in their apartment, a souvenir from Venice that I found much more captivating than their car.

In 1966, the same year the Volga Automobile Factory (VAZ) opened, a wildly popular movie directed by Eldar Ryazanov, Beware of the Car (Берегись автомобиля), was playing in theaters. The plot centers on Yury Detochkin, a do-gooder insurance agent who turns amateur sleuth to identify cars that have been purchased with ill-gotten gains. He then steals these cars, sells them, and anonymously donates the proceeds to orphanages.

The movie did not imply that all car owners (or as they were referred to at the time, автолюбители – probably best translated as motoring enthusiasts or more literally as autolovers) were necessarily corrupt. Detochkin loses the trust of a detective friend when he accidentally steals a car from an honest man who turns out to be an academician and highly respected scholar. That, apparently, was the sort of person who could legitimately own a car in Russia in the sixties.

Of course there were cars driving around on Moscow streets: the Volga, with its iconic leaping deer hood ornament, the rather compact Zaporozhets, and the speedy Moskvich. Who was behind the wheels of these cars, I had no idea.

Even though car ownership didn’t seem like anything we could even aspire to, it was interesting to read about the new and wonderful Zhigulis being produced by the factory in Tolyatti. This name seemed rather funny to us. In theory, the model was named for a small mountain range that cascades down to the Volga not far from the factory. But even for a Moscow schoolgirl, the first thing the word brought to mind was beer, since a famous brand bore the same name. Although the name might have seemed silly, the Zhiguli was generally faster and better than other cars. My young mind understood that this superior quality had something to do with Italy, although I had only the haziest notion what Italian cars were like. In the Italian neorealist films that were shown in Moscow when I was a child, people mostly got around on foot or bicycles. They were also not the sorts who could afford a car.

Now I realize that the first Zhiguli model, the renowned Kopek, was essentially a copy of the Italian Fiat, but in childhood that word meant nothing to me. It was just interesting that some “special” new cars that looked different from other cars would be appearing on the streets.

Sometime later I read a letter in the newspaper written by a distraught woman. Her husband had been an experienced driver who never broke the rules of the road, but as soon as he started driving a Zhiguli, he began getting citations left and right. In the end, he died in a traffic accident. The editors, apparently in an effort to comfort her, informed the widow that her husband’s experience was far from unique and that Zhigulis were involved in more accidents than other models. It seems they were right. The Zhiguli drove more smoothly at higher speeds than other Soviet vehicles, and the brakes were more sensitive, meaning that there was a constant danger of being rear-ended by some less responsive Moskvich.

We gradually grew accustomed to seeing Zhigulis on our streets. Other models followed the Kopek – so many that, after a while, it became hard to keep them straight.

Many years passed and one fine day I bought my own car, as did a large percentage of my friends and acquaintances. After perestroika, many people were able to afford cars, at least in Moscow. And now people were driving all sorts of cars, not just Zhigulis. But my first car was a Kopek. As my more experienced friends explained, I was bound to put all kinds of dents and scrapes on my first car, so it might as well be a Zhiguli. That way I wouldn’t have to worry about it so much.

But I did worry about it, especially as it was constantly breaking down. After a while, my son and I sold it for 250 rubles and stood by morosely as it was hauled away, dented and scraped, on some sort of trailer.

Next, we bought ourselves a Pyatyorka, a No. 5, the fifth Zhiguli model, which we nicknamed the Eggplant because of its color. The Eggplant also broke down a lot. The electrical system would shut down; the gas pedal broke off; the alarm would refuse to shut off, terrorizing the entire neighborhood with its loud whooping; the battery died and had to be replaced; and the steering wheel was so hard to turn that it left your arms sore.

But this was a really lovable car, and I feel grateful towards it, as do, I suspect, thousands of others who drove or still drive Zhigulis. The Eggplant was relatively affordable, and although it needed frequent repairs, those repairs were also fairly inexpensive. Best of all, it could go far and fast. What more could anyone want? A very democratic car.

But the era of the Zhiguli came to an end. A car that once seemed to us the height of modern engineering suddenly lost its luster next to the foreign imports that gradually began to appear in our country. We now saw that there were cars that needed fewer repairs and were faster, more maneuverable, and safer.

My son, who was then working as a photographer, once sent me a text message: “I’m shooting a Mercedes show. The Eggplant is curiously peeking in from around the corner.”

Of course we never could afford a Mercedes, but we’ve been driving around in a Volkswagen for quite a while now. After the Eggplant broke down and became a total invalid, we sold it to a migrant worker (this time for 20,000 rubles, which after adjusting for inflation, is approximately equal to the 250 rubles we got for our Kopek). Its new owner totaled it a few months later.

Now, every time I pass the site where our Eggplant perished, I release a melancholy sigh. It’s not that I wish I could go back to driving a Zhiguli. There’s no turning back the clock, and I’m not so young as to be able to handle that steering wheel. But Zhigulis provoke strange, sentimental feelings in me, taking me back to a time when the car was a sensation, when we were young and finally able to buy our own car, sit behind the wheel, and drive into what seemed to be a brighter future…