The car show in front of the Avtozavod Palace of Culture on June 1, 2016 was dedicated to three memorable dates simultaneously – the 60th Anniversary of Volga GAZ-21, the 70th Anniversary of GAZ-20 Pobeda and the coming 85th Anniversary of the Gorky Automobile Plant. Participants, including over 60 Volgas and 7 Pobedas, arrived from all over the former Soviet Union. I’ve tried to limit the number of photos, concentrating on the most typical or rarest specimens. I’ve grouped them based on model and / or years of production.
1957-1958 model / 1st Series:
1959-1962 model / 2nd Series:
This 1959 GAZ-21I still bears severely faded original brown nitrocellulose paint.
The deer mascot, as installed on cars produced before 1962, except for taxicabs and some export versions. In the 1960s and 70s the State Technical Inspection often demanded the statuette being removed because of severe wounds it inflicted on a pedestrian in case of a road accident – with little effect, obviously. Much more real was the risk of it being stolen by “collectors”. Taxicabs had a much more modest teardrop-shaped hood ornament.
1962-1970 model / 3rd Series:
V8-powered GAZ-23.
5.5 liter / 340 c.i. aluminum V8 with 4-bbl carb, a version of the Chayka engine.
GAZ-22 wagon by Konela, originally sold in Finland. Station wagons were arguably the most versatile and appealing cars in the first generation Volga line, but produced in relatively small numbers due to technological restrictions: a wagon’s body had to be welded in a separate welding jig, which had a severely limited output – no more than 8,000 bodies per year. Roughly half of this number were assembled as ambulances.
The tailgate makes for a nice table for a picnic.
An extremely rare GAZ-22B ambulance, only several original cars of this model are known to be still road worthy.
The Pobeda section of the show:
Factory Pobeda convertible was built in small numbers (circa 14,000 units) and is quite rare today.
These photos depict the process of restoration.
Floor shifter denotes a car built before 1950, when the column shifter was introduced.
As shown on this photo, this car is not a “real” convertible, but rather a regular sedan with a giant sunroof – the roof rails remain in place.
The soft top did not fold down, but rather had to be manually disassembled and put into trunk piece by piece. Which quite obviously did not add much to the joy of owning this car.
The ZIM, or GAZ-12, was essentially a stretched version of the Pobeda with a 90 hp 6-cylinder engine and suicide rear doors. Just like the Pobeda, this car utilized a unitized body with a separate front subframe – quite unusual for such a large vehicle.
With a wheelbase of 3200 mm / 126″, it is roughly comparable in size with the larger American full-size cars of its time, but has three rows of seats, like in a limousine. Styling is also very Americanesque, just as with most GAZ cars of that era.
The hood ornament glows bright red at night. I’ve seen this car cruising at night several times – in the light of days it loses the somewhat sinister look.
The ZIM had three stoplights, two lateral and one in the center – decades before that became mandatory.
There is no metal bar between the door glass and the vent wing. The front bench seat is fixed in place, its back doubles as the partition separating the driver from the rear passenger compartment.
An interesting juxtaposition of GAZ-21 Volga and the next model, GAZ-24 – both in Obkom Black.
This Volga from Estonia is far away from home…
…just as this one from Belarus.
And, for dessert – my own 1965 Volga GAZ-21R, finally up and happily running !
…not for very long, unfortunately – on the way home the Volga lost its muffler, much to the amusement of the eyewitnesses.
For the rest of the trip home it sounded like a race car, with a marginal increase in performance.
Great article. These Volgas are nice-looking cars, remind me a lot of the early ’50s Studebakers but seem even nicer, esp. the interiors. I am really digging that wagon too as well as the Pobeda convertible!
I wonder how many are in the US?
Three years ago I saw a black Volga 21 parked at a gas station here in Northern Virginia. Jay Leno has a white one.
Happy Motoring, Mark
I know about at least several in New York alone. One perished in Hurricane Katrina, unfortunately, but the owner Dmitri Shvetsov purchased another one, a 1st Series none the less, from Russia.
http://www.volga21.com/
and
http://gaz21.ru/forum/index.php?showforum=73&s=33f334cf43fc0a386393b6f2bf5ec509
Nice display of something I’m not sure Ive even seen in the metal, theres an early 50s Zim at Southwards museum ex embassy awaiting restoration but the regular cars never made it this far, I especially like the wagon and I can understand the lack of live ambulances they were most likely worked into the ground before replacement, Looking forward to discovering more about the Russian car scene.
Interesting hood ornament. Here in the Midwest a lot of deer,in just that very pose want to be hood ornaments.?
Neat post, I would love to own any of those cars pictured.
Very nice post. Here in Colombia we had Volgas 21 and 22 as taxicabs (coffee exchanged with USSR) They didn’t last much because of spare parts lack and no Volga dealer representation. I remember a joke: To test the high quality of Volgas mr. Kruschev organized a resistence race between a Ford and a Volga 21. Of course the Volga was defeated . The Pravda newspaper published eight columns the event: “The result of the race between the capitalist automoviles and a communist magnificent Volga was: Second place overall for the Volga and penultimate for the american Ford” 🙂
I have said it before and I will say it again…..
“as long as there are cars, there will be car guys in all corners of the world”
Stanislav,
Great article. However, I have a quick question.
I noticed a small dip in the middle of the front bumper of the older cars.
is this dip to crank the engine on very cold days??
Благодаря!
Yes, absolutely right guess ! If your battery goes dead somewhere in the middle of… nowhere, it is quite a desirable option. GAZ made cars equipped with hand cranks until… late 1990s at the very very least, or perhaps even into 2000s, I’m not sure.
What a great assemblage of Volgas and Pobedas! The first series Volgas still remind me for all the world of a shrunken ’52 Ford…
Neat to see the ZIM there also. When I was a child, I had a set of encyclopedias from ’57 that had belonged to my mother when she was young. The ‘A’ volume had a very nice collection of photos of 50’s cars in its automobiles entry, and I distinctly remember one of them was of a ZIM. For years afterwards I couldn’t find much information on them and I wondered if it was a misprint of ZIL…but sure enough, this is the right car.
Your own Volga is looking quite nice too!
Thanks, Chris !
Surely, it has a lot of various American DNA traces… ’45 and ’52 Fords, ’51 Kaiser & Henry J, ’53 Plymouth, Studebakers, etc. – you name it.
A curious fact – the original prototypes built in 1954-55 had 2nd Series type grille (picture)… someone quite conservative in Kremlin didn’t like it, as it looked _too distinctive_ – too much unlike today foreign cars, you know. Looking like a foreign car was a good thing, a sign of quality of sorts – an ill-advised idea inherited from the very first years of the Soviet car building, when all cars were either copies or variations of foreign cars.
So the designers had to replace it with the horizontal bar and a star. What no only made it resemble a bunch of foreign cars including ’52-’54 Fords, but also compromised the structural integrity of the whole front body section because the original grille was a structural element an the tiny bar it had to be substituted with – wasn’t (hence the short production run).
One day I’m going to post an English translation of the 1954 Ford road test report published by GAZ in 1957, I think it would be quite an interesting reading – a look at an American car from the point of view of the Soviet engineers of mid-1950s.
Those are all beautiful old cars, but my favorite is that V8 GAZ-23. It would be fun to take that one for a drive. I would also LOVE to read an English translation of the road test that you’re talking about.
Good looking cars and a well written article .
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THANK YOU for sharing this .
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-Nate
Similar to Australian cars, Soviet cars are from a parallel universe.
No Ladas?
Wonderful post! I love to see who International CC is becoming.