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I did wonder, given that - as I'd read as a child - Kruschev pushed cars for the common man as part of his post-Stalin renaissance, but somebody forgot to build the supply chain for accessories, so that even windscreen wipers were a luxury that nobody could leave attached to their car when they parked it. My folks had this book on their shelves, which had an anecdote about how people would keep their windscreen wipers inside the car, so that when it rained there would be a mass pulling-over on the side of the road while people reattached the wipers. When I started following a former propaganda "executive" from the Moscow Agitprop bureau on social media, I asked him to verify this story. He said "Yes! When one of our journalists took a photograph of a famous sportsman doing the windscreen wipers dance, he got into a lot of trouble."
itsbruce-
My grandad just rawdogged the rain in his ‘Volga’, no wipers. Partly as an anti-theft measure, but mainly due to being absolutely terrified of them wearing out.
He then got excommunicated from the Soviet party and almost sent to a gulag for believing he was doing the right thing in exposing corruption by the apparatchiks embezzling machinery from the steel processing plant where he was an engineer, and was forced to work as a PR agent for a spiritual healer, and as a smuggler of cars and parts from Europe. There were wipers oozing out of our every orifice.
Sorry, how rude of me: #csb
ectoplasmosis
As a Soviet, it’s mad seeing this kind of shit being unearthed. I had toy versions of this exact trailer thing as a kid, but the actual ‘product’ was mythical; it wasn’t ‘sold’ as such, or even advertised.
Everyone knew it existed, and being the USSR, there was only one version of this thing in existence, with a decades-long waiting list which required you to be in a privileged position within the Communist Party to even be eligible to sign up for. Nobody had ever seen one IRL, but everyone had an uncle’s best mate’s third cousin who had one.
Every kid had the toy though, along with the ‘Vazik’ (Lada Niva) tow vehicle.