The dream of owning a car is often linked to a city. Detroit, Turin, Wolfsburg - or Tolyatti. The town on the Volga River in the 1960s sparked the yearning of many Soviet citizens. Because here the Soviet Union wanted to catch up with the West, at least as far as cars are concerned: on four square miles, the state stamped a car plant in four years, and next to it a plant settlement was built for half a million inhabitants.
While three million passenger cars were produced in West Germany in 1965, the Soviet industry managed just 200,000 vehicles. That should change in Tolyatti - with an annual production of 600,000 cars. The place was named after Palmiro Togliatti, who died in 1964, head of the Italian Communist Party.
From the place of longing to the wrecked industrial city
Because in addition to a 320 million dollar loan from the Italian state, the expertise and the car came from Italy: the first model of the Volga plant, in Russian Wolschskij Awtomobilnij Sawod (WAS) called, based on the Fiat 124th The Italian group received in return Soviet steel - whose susceptibility to rust damaged the image of Fiat and Co. massively.
The Soviet automobile dream began promisingly, workers pouring in from all corners of the country to the Volga River to get a larger apartment and a car on installments. After only four years, the work was finished - three years earlier than initially calculated. In 1970, the first car rolled off the line, in 1973 already the millionth Schiguli, as the Lada on the home market was called.
photo gallery
14 pictures
Photo gallery: With the classic car in the battleAt that time, 120,000 people worked at the plant in Tolyatti, which became the Wolfsburg of the Soviet Union. However, with the end of the Cold War, the decline began here as well. AwtoWAS dismissed more and more employees, in 2013 there were only 67,000, by 2018, the number of employees fell again to around 36,000. Meanwhile, the city has one of the highest poverty rates in Russia.
No understanding of high-gloss classic cars
A group of teenagers whose parents and grandparents worked at AwtoWAS are living this automobile heritage in an unusual way. They buy scrap schigulis, as Lada is called here, restore them with minimal effort, and burn their "Boevaya Klassika" - "wild ones Classic "- called cars at races and drift events on parking lots and frozen lakes. However, they attract not only many spectators, but also the police, who then try to drive them out, says Alexei Levin, a member of the group. But that meant only additional entertainment for her: "We consider it a game."
Old cars, which are bought in desolate condition, to repair consuming and herauszuputzen, would be for Alexei Levin, a member of the group, out of the question: "There is not much that should be preserved." The cars they buy cheap, for the equivalent of about 200 US dollars, screw them yourself - so they do not deal with them very carefully. "Every collision with other cars, every fence is a lot of fun for me," says Levin. The photographer Anar Movsumov was able to look around the workshops of the "Boevaya Klassika" and accompany the drivers to their drift races. A selection of his photos you can see in the photo gallery.