Stick her in H!

The broad pattern of life in on either side of the Iron curtain wasn’t that different. Slums in working class areas were replaced with grim, cheap and poorly made high-rise concrete housing. People went to work, played with their children and ate family meals. It was the details that were different – people had increasing access to new technology in both blocs, it just tended to happen a lot faster in the West. This became more noticeable as the information age dawned; while the soviet union excelled at projects requiring crude heavy industry, churning out robust machinery designed to withstand its harsh climate (such as trucks and tanks), it was hopelessly behind the West in the production of more delicate and complex consumer items such as home computers. UK citizens could purchase a ZX Spectrum home computer for £175 in 1982 (the equivalent of around £550 today). By contrast, the Soviet equivalents were produced in such small numbers that they could only be found in businesses or research institutes.

Cars are an interesting illustration of this. Could there be a more potent symbol of the crass individualism of the western way of life? The very concept of ‘owning’ a car posed numerous problems in a communist country that seem quaint to a capitalist reader, as Lewis H. Siegelbaum points out in his book Cars for Comrades; “Court cases resounded with the ambiguities of car ownership and use: could a citizen buy a car and then present it to his son as a gift? … could one citizen legally swap his [car] for a Jupiter motorcycle and Astra tape recorder?”

While western drivers could stroll in to a garage, pick their brand, model, colour and extra features and drive off an hour later, their communist brethren had no such luck.

Instead of commodities to be purchased, cars were used as a method of control, allowing the government to prevent the ‘wrong people’ from gaining freedom of movement and to reward to workers who exceeded their quotas. (“If you build 100 tractors this month, you could go on the waiting list for a car!”).

Even if you could actually get your hands on a car, you had to contend with the fact that this was definitively not a society set up for private ownership of automobiles. Siegelbaum observes that service stations could not find enough work just from repairing cars – they also had to work on washing machines and refrigerators. The government prioritised allocations of fuel to truck drivers, which inadvertently incentivised them to re-sell the fuel to private drivers on the black market on a scale that “dwarfed legal sales” – 7.5 billion litres in 1984.

Spare parts were so rare that the most feasible way to obtain them was to steal them from another car. This lead to paranoid motorists taking any removable items off their cars each night, keeping them in their apartments.

The quality of communist automobiles is memorably parodied in The Simpsons episode “Mr Plow”. After Homer crashes his car in a snowstorm, he visits ‘Crazy Vaclav's Place of Automobiles’ in search of a replacement. Vaclav attempts to sell Homer a car which he brags "will get three hundred hectares on a single tank of kerosene." When Homer inquires where the car comes from, Vaclav responds that "the country no longer exists" and implores him to "stick her in [gear] H!" as he pulls away for a test drive.

While this might seem like a ridiculous parody, you can see the inspiration in real vehicles such as the Invacar, a single seat vehicle provided to disabled people by the UK government and designed to give them more independence without the complexity of a full-sized car. While the original model was only powered by a 147cc engine, later ones offered 600cc and were capable of up to 80mph, which sounds a bit terrifying in a vehicle this size. This idea seems to have caught on in the east as well, with communist governments offering their own models. However, it fell out of favour in the west when governments realised it was much cheaper to offer disabled people grants to modify normal production cars, which they would then maintain out of their own pockets. This option also significantly reduced the risk of immolation – the BBC quoted one user who recalled that "I had a few go on fire on me, so you'd stop and other motorists would drag you out as the thing went up in flames." (https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-23061676)