In fact, the articles in “Behind the Wheel” for Chudakov were not the main thing. Enough of other serious activities: work in US on the theory of the car, participation in trials and runs, teaching. But from the first issue of the magazine, Evgeni Alekseevich readily and willingly wrote a lot for the growing community of Russian motorists. For the most part, these were working people of a country devastated by world and civil wars, often not very savvy, and sometimes simply illiterate. These people brought life together with the then miracle of technology - a car, and Chudakov's articles became for many a primary and secondary driving school, and for some, a university.
He had a rare gift to talk about complex, and sometimes boring things (for example, about grades of gasoline) simply, clearly, even fascinatingly. Chudakov’s topics range from fuel quality to the choice of types of machines for production in the USSR.
Some thoughts of Evgeni Alekseevich are not outdated to this day. Let’s say, “… motorization of the country and the expansion of the network of roads should be solved in parallel” - sounds in Russia at the beginning of the XXI century no less, and maybe more urgently, than eighty years ago.
But to the majority of readers at the wheel of the turn of the 1920s and 1930s. Chudakov’s name was remembered, first of all, for accessible and at the same time very comprehensive articles on the arrangement of the car. Not one generation of professionals, and later motorists through them, was introduced to the car - they learned the wisdom of carburetion and ignition, the principles of gas distribution mechanisms and gearboxes.
Today, these publications may seem somewhat naive. But let’s imagine: in terms of the complexity of the device, for most readers who were not at all sophisticated in the technique of technology, a car in those years was almost an airplane. Tens of thousands of citizens, who have barely begun to fill the country's fill, are eager to drive a car and know it. Each article that approaches this goal is worth its weight in gold, and here, in fact, a textbook set forth in a beautiful, accessible language.
A graduate of a higher imperial technical school, a typical Russian intellectual, Chudakov would surely have made a good career outside the Soviet Union. In 1916, a young talented engineer, a vocation researcher, who, by the way, was fluent in English, ended up in the UK - he participated in the acceptance of cars for the Russian army. In 1918, he returned to bustling Russia … Not because he took special interest in the October Revolution - he simply could not imagine himself in another country.
