While the detrimental effects of the car have only recently hit Russia, the automobile’s political, economic, and cultural significance dates from the early Soviet period. According to Lewis Siegelbaum‘s recent book Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Cornell UP, 2008), what the Soviets called “automobilism” had multiple meanings. It represented a particularly Soviet understanding of modernity, one rooted in the promise of the socialist system itself. The car also symbolized power and freedom. Power in that the elite usually had cars and, during the Great Terror, cars came to be equated with the secret police. The car meant freedom in that those citizens lucky enough to get one expanded their “private” sphere through greater mobility and leisure. As Siegelbaum shows, the Soviet car may have been an unobtainable luxury for the vast majority of Soviet citizens, but its effects on the Soviet imagination were deep and long lasting.

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