Sam Glover
How Russia’s Detroit outlived its American cousin
Sam continues his exploration of Gorky, the Soviet Motown.
In the last issue, we looked at how Ford and the Austin Company were commissioned in 1929 to build a Soviet Detroit. A patch of swampy land became the Gorky Automobile Factory – or GAZ. It was Europe’s biggest car plant and it produced its first Ford Model A clone in early 1932. In 1938, it employed 40,000 workers and built more than 100,000 Model A and B variants. It was post-wwii, however, that things got really interesting – just as they did in on the other side of the Atlantic.
Work began on GAZ’S first all-new car as early as December 1941 and continued while the factory suffered nightly visits from the Luftwaffe and built hundreds of thousands of military vehicles. Led by forward-thinking designer Andrey Lipgart, the car that became the GAZ M20 did not want for ambition. A 1938 Opel Kapitän was the primary source of inspiration and the M20 inherited many of its advanced features – not least its unitary construction. Prototypes with 2.1-litre straight-four and 2.7-litre straight-six flathead engines were presented to Stalin on June 19, 1945. He gave the former a green light and approved the name ‘Pobeda’, or ‘victory’.
Post-war boom
Tooling up for mass production was an uphill struggle, thanks to materials shortages and piles of rubble where bits of the factory should’ve been. Body dies represented a major headache, this being the first time they’d been produced in the USSR without western input. Nevertheless, the first M20s left the factory on June 28, 1946 – just six days after production of the all-new Kaiser-frazer began in the USA. Sadly, problems persisted and it took a further three years to iron out the wrinkles.
Lipgart’s department expanded. Recruits included two talented stylists: Russian Lev Yeremeyev and Englishman John Williams, who’d defected to the USSR after fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Their first project was the M12 – or ZIM – which launched in 1951. It was a luxurious extension of the Pobeda concept, with a 5.5-metre unitary body and a 3.5-litre straight-six engine.
‘We need cars that are not American and not European, but Soviet,’ was Lipgart’s address to a conference of engineers before commencement of his most famous project at GAZ: the M21 ‘Volga’. Sadly, it was also his last, as Stalin remembered in December 1951 that he hadn’t been punished for the M20's teething troubles and sent him to work as an engineer at the Ural truck plant. Yeremeyev and Williams developed parallel concepts under new chief designer Alexander Nevzorov – Yeremeyev’s a three-box saloon; Williams’s a more radical fastback. Yeremeyev’s won. The M21, unveiled in May 1955 and entering production in its final form in June 1957, was exactly as Lipgart had specified: small for an American car but big for a European one; stylish and comfortable but not ostentatious; perfectly designed for harsh Russian conditions. It was simple but impeccably engineered, with an all-aluminium overhead-valve 2.5-litre straight-four engine, good off-road capability and bulletproof construction.
The V8-engined M13 ‘Chaika’ was next, replacing the M12 as GAZ’S sinister flagship. Then came the Volga M24, presented at the Kremlin in November 1964 and replacing the M21 in July 1970. Though it lacked the glitz of its predecessor, it was elegant, up-to-date and thoroughly fit-for-purpose.
Outliving Motown
Brezhnev-era stagnation set in. The M14 ‘Chaika’ – an unadventurous but competent M13 replacement – launched in 1976. The GAZ 3105 destined to be the next generation of Volga never saw production. The M24 would be the basis of all subsequent cars until GAZ switched exclusively to the manufacture of commercial vehicles in 2009, a flirtation with a Chrysler Sebring badged the 'Volga Siber' aside.
Despite a lack of product development, though, car production at Gorky held steady as Detroit fell to pieces. I’ve visited both Detroit and Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) recently – and it’s the latter that’s the healthier and more upbeat of the two cities.
GAZ continues to churn out vans and trucks.
Ninety years after conception, the city’s Avtostroi district and many of the original Ford-designed buildings are still functioning exactly as intended.