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170 10 “LITTLE TSARS OF THE ROAD” Soviet Truck Drivers and Automobility, 1920s–1980s Lewis H. Siegelbaum When Heinz Lathe and Günther Meierling, two German ex-POWs who returned to Soviet Russia in 1958, drove south from Moscow in their diesel-powered Mercedes , they passed long lines of trucks but met their first car only after they had traveled forty-three kilometers (twenty-seven miles). Their experience was not unique.“We met a number of lorries, but saw few cars,” wrote the British journalist Patrick Sergeant about his trip along the same route a few years earlier. How could it be otherwise when until 1960 fewer than a third of all four-wheeled vehicles produced annually in the USSR were cars, and few cars ventured much beyond the limits of the major cities? Sergeant confidently asserted on the basis of his lengthy road journey that“most Soviet people travel by train, river in the summer, air and long-distance bus.” But his German counterparts noted that “lorries do stop” and that there were people with suitcases in all of them.1 If the Soviet Union could be said to have entered the automobile age by this time, it did so not in “light” (legkovye) automobiles—the standard term for cars—but in their heavier cousins, trucks. Recently scholars have been employing the term “automobility” to characterize “the principal socio-technical institutions and practices that seek to organize, accelerate and shape the spatial movements and impacts of automobiles.”Construed as a“hybrid assemblage”consisting of “humans, machines, roads and other spaces, representations, regulatory institutions and a host of related businesses and infrastructural features,” the term seemingly encompasses not only cars and their drivers but the trucks and truckers with whom they share the road.Yet thus far the hybrid has been understood exclusively as “car-driver,” and in the short span of its scholarly existence automobility has become more or less synonymous with car culture. Though automobility may no longer be “a neglected topic within sociol- “LITTLE TSARS OF THE ROAD” 171 ogy, cultural studies and related disciplines,” as Mike Featherstone complained it was a few years back, within automobility studies, trucking still seems neglected.2 The purpose of this chapter is twofold: to insert automobility into our understanding of the experience of human movement in Russia, particularly during the decades when trucks outnumbered cars, and to bring the Soviet experience to bear on scholarly conversations about automobility. I will do so by examining truckers partly from the perspective of labor history—who became truckers, the conditions of their work, relations among them and with other motorists, their social status, and the extent to which and why these elements changed over time—and, to get at the broader cultural significance associated with truck driving, partly in terms of the highly gendered images of truckers in both political discourse and popular imagination. I see these two approaches as complementary and have organized their exposition to work in tandem. The nature of truckers’ work, their training, and the internal hierarchies of the occupation, after all, structured their representation in important ways; at the same time, the very categories used to distinguish among truckers and differentiate them from “amateur” (liubitel′skie) motorists, to say nothing of truckers’ own social behavior, arose out of a particular cultural milieu. Like Soviet truckers themselves, this inquiry into their automobility covers a lot of ground. Although many informational blank spots remain, the disparate materials at hand—articles in newspapers, trade journals, and automotive magazines; data and correspondence from transport workers’ unions deposited in Soviet archives ; short stories, novels, and films—are rich and plentiful. Moreover, if we waited for all the blank spots to be filled, we probably would be waiting forever. Better to accommodate the truckers even if only partially than to keep them in the penumbra of history. The Chuiskii Highway, or the Legend of Kol'ka and Raika Beginning in 2001, a made-for-television serial called Truckers (Dal'noboishchiki) ran on NTV. The series featured an old, crusty driver named Feodor Ivanych and his quick-tempered driving companion, Sasha Korovin, as they transported all manner of goods (in the inaugural episode it was “humanitarian goods for the wounded fighters in Chechnia”) across the length and breadth of the country.“To survive on Russia’s roads is not easy,” said NTV’s website. “Lurking on the highways are terrorists, slave traders, narco-dealers, and totalitarian sects.” The series was sufficiently successful to run for...

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