Behind the Iron Curtain part 15 – Cars


These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give perfect and objective evaluation of anything, but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.


Cars were some of those goods that were difficult to obtain and difficult to maintain, even when you had the money – so we never had one. We did not exactly need one either, because public transport was in those times sufficient. It was not market driven and thus was not dependent on population density.

However cars were still useful and partly they became a status symbol so many people in our little town never understood why my parents did not get one. One of my mother’s colleagues was visiting us one day and she snooped around in our garden shed looking for the car she was convinced we have stashed and hidden away there. She just did not understand that my parents did not use their positions to enrich themselves and get the much coveted goods of the time.

What was fairly typical of the cars was their distribution in any given land. Someone interested in cars could probably travel in hibernation between the various lands of the eastern bloc and then recognize which country they arrived at by looking out of the window at the nearest parking lot.

In Czechoslovak Socialist Republic the far most predominant cars were Skodas, at the time of my life mainly Skoda 120 and towards the end of the regime occasional Skoda Favorit. There were zero cars from the western part of Europe and a very limited amount of cars from other countries in the Soviet power sphere. Father of one of my classmates had a very coveted Lada VAZ-2101 “Žiguli” which was admired for its sturdiness and strength as well as for being essentially very rare piece. He only could afford it – and get his hands on it – because he was middle ranking military officer of the border patrol.

The parking spaces in CZ were mostly empty and usually there was some mix of different cars despite the prevalence of Skodas. I was not used to seeing many cars all at once, or a parking space really full.

So when I was visiting East Germany for a summer camp at about eleven or twelve years age, I had an entirely new experience at that time, one that was very strong to an impressionable little child.

Rows and rows of cars stretching for hundreds of meters on each side of the street. Parking lots so cramped it was difficult to squeeze between the cars. Different colors, but all the cars were essentially identical, leading to strange uniformity. All were Trabants.

Trabants were known in CZ, and they were much derided. They were the cheapo cars for those who could not afford a “proper” car. Having a Trabant was seen as a sign of under achievement, barely better than having no car at all. There were – and still are – many derogative terms for the car, like “angry vacuum cleaner”, or “bakeliťák”.

This added a discordant note to the experience. Seeing that eastern Germans had apparently more cars than we gave me a sense of awe, seeing that the cars are of lower quality gave me a sense of superiority. However the strongest of all the memories is the sense of a complete lack of choice and of a mind-numbing uniformity wherever you go. It was my first experience of an outward demonstration of the fact that we are actually expected to blend into crowds. And that everything in the system – all the overt legal and covert economic pressures – is designed to quash individuality and make us into a uniform mass.

I did not form this opinion so clearly at that time of course, but this was the start of that realization.

Comments

  1. jazzlet says

    I remember when the Wall came down and we started to see Eastern Bloc cars in the west that the Trabants were immediately the source of lots of jokes. Skoda of course went on to become one of the brands widely seen on British roads, and they are stll seen as good reliable cars.

  2. kestrel says

    “Angry vacuum cleaner”… ouch… What a great and descriptive name, I love it.

    You were a very astute and observant child.

  3. says

    Ah, the legendary Trabbi. When a child was born the grandparents would go and apply for a car so it would be delivered in time for the 18th birthday.

    However the strongest of all the memories is the sense of a complete lack of choice and of a mind-numbing uniformity wherever you go. It was my first experience of an outward demonstration of the fact that we are actually expected to blend into crowds. And that everything in the system – all the overt legal and covert economic pressures – is designed to quash individuality and make us into a uniform mass.

    Hmmm
    Now we are drowning in “choice”, only that most of the choice comes down to the colour of the Trabbi. We all have different phones, yet they’re all basically the same. We celebrate a hundred thousand “individualities” that are basically created via consumption and via “influencers”. We are still expected to uniformly submit to the rules of the system.

  4. says

    @Giliell, the uniformity you are speaking about is imposed on us from down up (mostly by peer pressure and popular opinions which defines fashions and trends etc.) and is, in my opinion, different from uniformity imposed from top down by the powers that be.

    The result for strong individualities, like artists, scientists and such like is of course often negative in either case.

  5. rq says

    And apartment buildings don’t have the parking capacity to deal with today’s ubiquity of cars. Because cars were a special case.

  6. secondtofirstworld says

    The thing I missed from this article is that in the late stages of the Eastern Bloc, per an agreement between the Italian politicians of Eurocommunist leaning and Poland, the Polski Fiat was born, which was a sort of Western car. In Hungary way back when the other somewhat Western cars were the Yugoslavian Zaporozec and the Romanian Dacia, on license from Renault (who now owns it).

    Giliell, I’m not familiar with Ossi customs in waiting time, the Hungarian Merkur had a two-tier system, you could apply, and as you say, wait for 18 years, but there was also a raffle which was through an assigned checkbook, if it was your number, you got the car earlier (not much earlier of course).

    The biggest problem to date is, that after the fall of the Second Republic, everyone who owned a car fled Hungary, so the driving style, that is still dominant in Hungary (as in, even if you have a green light as a pedestrian, look both ways, and they still can run you over) comes from Russians, and if you’ve seen crash compilations… it’s a lighter version, but still scary.

    Charly, I wanted to reply on #16 of this series, but by some weird magic it’s gone from the site.

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