Meanwhile, back in the USSR

Chuck Dempsey

Chuck Dempsey

Well-known member
Another pic I got from my Facebook group, labeled USSR 1938. I think I see a couple of Model A clones.....
 

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Those clones you see are GAZ "Uncle Joe" bought an entire factory from Henry Ford (And never paid him for it) produced the lookalike. There a guy on here, M2M, who speaks Russian and can tell you what the letters GAZ stand for Gorky Automobile Factory? Or something! I used to know but I forget. The two with the big artillery wheels are probably Packards. Another company that Stalin loved. He later patterned his big ZIM "Chaika" on on the later 39 48 packards up to the recently. It has been said that although Packard is dead in the US, It survives in Russia. I don't vouch for the accuracy of any of this. It's half remembered at best.
Terry
 
Well.....looking very closely at the picture, here is what I see:

- first car is a Ford Model A: note it is 1928-1929 - GAZ A looked like 1930-1931 style, also note top pointy inside of radiator shell - GAZ had commercial looking radiator shells)

- second car is a Horch (Germany): note the radiator ornament

- third car is a Ford Model A (note top pointy inside of radiator shell - GAZ A had commercial looking radiator shells)

- fourth car looks to be a Steyr (Austria): note the pointed radiator

The other cars are too blurry for me to see. There are however no GAZ cars nor Rolls-Royces nor Packards in this photo.

Brad in Maryland
 
Chuck your friend may be right. This building in the photograph appears to be the Gosprom, known as the State Industry Building in English. It is in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and was finished in 1928. At one time, it was the tallest building in the USSR.
 
German Horch! Yes of course! I once knew a guy who claimed to be the son of the Bulgarian Diplomat to Russia in the late 30s and he told me that they had a Horch that they used for official occasions. Yes, it's probably a Horch! Good Call! GAZ, Gorkovosky Auto. Zavod (Gorky Automobile Factory)! My mistake about Chaikas, the first one was produced in 1959.
 
In mid 1929 the USSR agreed to buy 72,000 assembled or "knocked down" (K.D.) Ford cars, trucks, parts and equipment from Ford USA and would assemble them in one of two assembly plants: Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod. Those assembly plants started assembling Ford Model A's from US imported parts, in February 1930.

(Note that the GAZ factory in Nizhny Novgorod did not open for production until 1932.)

So the Ford Model A's in this picture are most likely some of those Ford Model A's that were imported from the USA either pre-assembled or as K.D. and then assembled in Russia.

By the way, that contract between Ford and the USSR was signed on 31 May (yesterday) 1929.

Brad in Maryland
 
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This interests me. Back in 1958, when I was stationed in Pirmasens, Germany, I had a well used 1950 Mercedes 170-S. I often parked it in the parking lot next to an old Horch which had HUGE wooden wheels. It belonged to an officer who was planning to take it home to the US. I've often wondered about what happened that Horch.
 
Chuck, I would guess that the Horch was around a 1928 model or perhaps a few years older. I remember that the top of the wheels/tires were enormous compared to those on my Mercedes.
 
Hoovercw said:
That Rolls sure speaks volumes about the equality of all workers in the USSR.
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It's not a Rolls, this Western limo may have been been a gift from a Western government, likely Hitler's Germany. Brezhnev, for example, was given a Rolls as a present from the British. USSR made their own state limos in the 1930s, the ZIS 101 and the later ZIS 110. This trend continues today with Putin now using a NAMI state limo.
 
Chuck Dempsey said:
Brad, any idea what 'body styles' these 72,000 were? A variety, I would assume....
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Nope, I have no clue what body styles they were.

Here are two era magazine advertisements for Ford cars, in Russian, from the Russian magazine titled "American Engineer and Industry":

October 1929:
362050


June 1930:
362051


Brad in Maryland
 

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These are the "Ford Timken" mentioned in the chart above:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Frus-texnika.ru%2Fistoriya-gorkovskogo-avtozavoda-ford-timken.html&edit-text=&act=url


 And by the way, the 10 Tudors the chart shows were assembled in 1929 were put together in Kharkov (Kharkiv), coincidentally, the city where the photo at the top was taken. See:

https://translate.google.com/transl...ru/ford-a-tudor-sedan.html&edit-text=&act=url


Here's a photo of Model A Coupes at USSR assembly plant in 1932, so many body styles were made but AA and A phaetons were the most common once production started in Dec. 1932.

25520166_10155293861487153_1269483658_n.jpg


 
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In 1927, the Soviet Union possessed no indigenous automobile industry; a decade later, it had established a complex system of plants for car and truck production. A the center of this system was GAZ that owed its existence to the technical assistance agreement with Ford Motor Company. On the basis of this agreement, Soviet engineers copied the entirety of Ford’s production processes on location at River Rouge and recreated them in central Russia.
Only a couple of decades later, the US military were meeting GAZ trucks and jeeps on the battlefield in Korea and Vietnam, see:

https://www.drive2.com/b/1364265/


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