Much like communism, this article began with the greatest of optimism. And, like communism, it was a simple and logical plan born out of generally benign intentions. Convince the editors to allow me to write about my road trip from DC to Chicago in a 1968 GAZ 21 Volga. Complain about the atrocious build quality and creature comforts of a Soviet-style “luxury car.” Take copious potshots at communism, laugh about the ten-year waiting list for this vehicle, and generally weave a tapestry of profanity directed at fellow travelers, useful idiots, and Jane Fonda. Sprinkle with quotes from Marx, Reagan, and the Beatles. Conclude with something halfway serious about the genius of the founders and the soul-crushing evil of communism. Think of a self-indulgent literary chimera of Whittaker Chambers, P. J. O’Rourke, Jack Kerouac, and Hunter S. Thompson. 

But, like communism, this simple plan was met with the harshness of reality. While I did not suffer from the purges of Stalin, the backwards leaps of Mao, or an overbearing spouse like Nicolae Ceaușescu, my plans nevertheless died when the fuel pump failed less than two miles from my house. I was left with a car that would not drive and an article about a road trip that I could not finish. Not as bad as Prague ’68, Tiananmen ‘89, or modern-day Austin, TX but it crushed my plans for a better world. 

So how does one review a car he barely drove? The obvious place would be to start with reliability. As noted, it was essentially non-existent. Imagine an automotive cross between Chernobyl and Plastic Ono Band. It was that bad. I am not just bitter. It was so awful that being careful (don’t run the reactor too hot comrade, the amusement park just opened) or swapping out a few parts (like Yoko) was never going to make it better. It was a deeply flawed design that stole from decades-old Western models and then reproduced in a Soviet command economy.

The car was bad in a pernicious and cynical manner. It was so bad in fact that the designers and builders of this monstrosity had to have known this car was destined to fail. But why would you, the good worker in the Gorky plant, care to improve on a car that you would never actually get the opportunity to own? You wouldn’t. You might care about the Ukraine girls who could really knock you out and leave the capitalist pigs behind, but about your job, not really. Just put in your time, hit your quota, avoid causing any trouble, and try not to notice that all pigs really are not equal. Maybe in ten years, when we get around to my turn in the queue, I can be bothered to care. Until then, put the paper bag on your knee and disconnect the phone.

Since I still have this monstrosity parked in my driveway (gee, it’s good to be back home), I can take some additional time to critique things like the design. As you would expect, it is horrid, but in a schizophrenic manner. It is overbuilt to a clownish level, but also so cheap as to beggar description. For example, the frame and the body of the car are very solid. They have so much steel that they must have helped some deputy-assistant-to-the-general-secretary-minister-in-chief-local-commisar-economist-whoever make their numbers for production that year. Seemingly every structural member is made from an I-beam large enough and strong enough to build an impressive skyscraper out of, but instead, they made it into a car. It’s that overbuilt. 

In the very same car, however, there is a baffling amount of cheapness. Creature comforts be damned. If it might keep your comrade warm, or make the experience even slightly enjoyable, then forget about it. Fly back to Miami if you want fun. In the Volga, you will have a dreadful flight drive. Imagine if you took the toys from the dentist’s office box and bolted them at random to the inside of the car. Here is your doorknob, your steering wheel, your manual choke, etc. The location of the buttons makes no sense. The feel is worse. It probably will not work anyway. Critical systems such as the horn and the hood release knob were both 50-50 propositions at best, and you will need them to warn others that you cannot control the ungainly car that they are gawking at, and then you will attempt the Sisyphean masochism of trying to repair it, so it would be nice to write in a complete non-run on sentence but oh whatever I am so broken I clearly do not care about the car or grammar anymore sorry to my editors and English teachers you tried. 

The carpet is cheap, but, unlike Gorbachev’s head, surprisingly clean. The cleanliness of the carpet actually makes sense in a perverse way. The car has only been driven an average of about 1,000 miles per year since new, and it lacks bourgeois things like cup holders for your non-existent Coca-Cola to spill out from. The seatbelts are aftermarket additions (pimp my ride Soviet style) that might slow your body down enough to make your face identifiable at the morgue after it hits the non-safety glass. The radio thankfully does not work but looks like a sad version of a counterfeit easy-bake oven that has been in direct sunlight for three millennia. You get the point. Bus tokens are preferable to this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad car.

The driving experience is actually not as bad as you might expect. Provided, of course, that you are used to driving a tractor on your daddy’s farm and that it works long enough to experience forward motion. It feels industrial and old fashioned, but ok. It’s as though an International Harvester and a Ford Model T from the 1920s had a love child. The brakes have the feel of the coaster brakes on my first bicycle. Stomp hard and hope you do not skid off the road. Perhaps I am suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Perhaps I am damning it with faint praise, but the driving experience is a relative strength. People often talk about the tyranny of low expectations. They are wrong. I have now experienced the humorous glee and terror of low expectations. It is a feeling worth having once, but rarely survived twice. Overall, the car is terrible. It was bad then; it is worse now. 

So, at about this point in the article, I had planned to transition to a love letter to American capitalism. I still love those things, and that would in many ways be the simplest way to conclude. However, my brief and tortured experience with this car has taught me something else. The Brezhnev-Error truly was horrific. Not in the mass murder-ey way of Stalin or the high-tech Orwellian manner of the Chinese today. No, this was cynical, and stale, and banal. It took the ideals of those who placed their trust in the communist state and deprived millions of joy and dignity and meaning. 

While my road trip ended in disappointment, I found an unexpectedly profound sense of understanding and empathy. If the communists would build this cynical car, make people wait ten years to purchase it, and then label it as a luxury item, then what does this say about the broken society that produced it in the first place? No wonder Brezhnev thought that necking with Jimmy Carter was a fun way to kill time at a peace summit! He presided over a regime that produced GAZ 21 Volgas! You don’t know how lucky you are boy(s and girls) not to have to drive this or be back in the USS-car.