Why did you write this book, colleagues? And yet, did we have a car industry?
YAKU3740low
YAKU3741low
M. K. - For me - definitely: was. And do not remind me of the technical level: I am an engineer and I understand everything. It is possible that the cars of Russia that left us secretly dreamed of modern technologies and flat autobahns, civilized services and secure garages … But the reality was a little different: they worked together with their country where it was needed. On the pavement and in the swamp, with passengers and cargo, in state trials and in summer trips, in the snow and in the rain …
The fragments of that “non-modern” life are preserved by our memory. For those whose age does not allow such memories to be extracted from it, it remains to trust the testimonies of photo and film lenses that have managed to “grab” fragments of the past era that run away forever. And the old cinema also helps - albeit a hundred times naive, politicized, and I don’t know which, but all this is no less good. The country drove its cars - both on Red Square, and along the Siberian winter roads. But today, it seems, no one already believes in this …
A. V.-O. - I have been friends with the Russian auto industry since I was four years old. And there is documentary evidence to this in the book: see the little one pumping up the wheel of the Moskvich-401 in 1953? This car served faithfully for 21 years, on it my father taught me to drive, then she passed the driving test in the traffic police, she was in the wedding procession, and then brought her son from the hospital. And only in the 74th gave way again to the Nashensky “penny”.
Note that, although those post-war machines required constant routine lubrication with a syringe in their hands, they were very reliable, contrary to today's opinion: the Muscovites never went on strike on the road! Well, maybe the tires were punctured.
I also put a part of the family photo archive in this book: my father worked all his life at GAZ and gave a ticket to the life of most army cars. And not only the army. In those years, military envoys monitored the quality of export products as a structure independent of the factory administration. Ordinary OTC too easily conceded to “requests” coming from above not to ruin the plan. And until now, oddly enough, the belief has remained that export “frets” are better than those for domestic consumption.
In short, OUR car industry was. Will it stay? God knows …
So the authors of the new book think. To agree with them or not is the right of readers. Some reviews of the book can be found, for example, here.
Here is what maestro Ilya Sorokin thinks, for example:
The book Cars. Outgoing Russia”wrote (co-authored with Alexei Vorobyov-Obukhov) my good old acquaintance“Zarulevets”Mikhail Kolodochkin. The same journalist who knows how to drive a serial Volvo from Moscow to St. Petersburg and vice versa on one tank may be someone who remembers the sensational article in Rule.
When you go to work and work from the car, you read noticeably less, sometimes even the habit is lost. “The most reading people” we came to know mainly thanks to those who travel in the subway. But I read the book “Misha” in three evenings. Something in her “hooked” me. A simple honest language, a close topic of interest to me, a lot of indescribable "intimate" coincidences … as if I went to Grishkovets.