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1 INTRODUCTION Lewis H. Siegelbaum In March 1992, less than a year after Communism fell in Albania, Henry Kamm of the New York Times traveled to Noj, a “dirt-poor village” north of the capital, Tirana . There he encountered “shattered buildings, piles of rubble,” and other signs of the wave of vengeful destructiveness that had swept through the village months earlier. “They felt they were destroying Communism,” a young shopkeeper told him. But some, it turned out, regretted their actions, in particular sacking the local clinic to empty it of the medicines that had been delivered just the day before. “Under the Communist Government,” Kamm reported, “even people in remote zones could count on a car from the cooperative to take them to the clinic. Now, as one resident told him,“no cooperative, no car.” It is not clear from Kamm’s report whether the villagers regretted more the loss of the clinic or their access to the car. For under the Communists there were no privately owned cars in Albania, and by the time Kamm arrived, the drivers of collective vehicles had taken them over and were using them “as they see fit.” The daily bus that used to link Noj with Tirana now came only when the driver “felt like it.”Yet only five years later, the Times reported that “free”Albania had become “one of the best customers for Europe’s stolen cars.” Tirana, where “big sedans jostle[d] each other on potholed and dusty roads” as they whizzed by donkeys pulling carts, allegedly had more Mercedes per capita than most other European cities. The residents of Noj and most of the rest of the country, however, probably did not share in the bounty. At twenty-three per thousand people, Albania’s passenger car density was still Europe’s lowest.1 Albania under the dictator Enver Hoxha represents an extreme case—as it did in many other ways—in the awkward fit between cars and Communism. Only Kim Il Sung’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea matched its ban on private LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM 2 car ownership. Elsewhere in the socialist camp the situation was more complicated and, because of its many ambiguities, more fascinating too.2 The principal objective of this book—the outgrowth if a workshop held in June 2008 at the Berlin School for Comparative European History (BKVGE)—is to explore the interface between the motor car and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR. We posit a dynamic tension between these two artifacts of human invention—the car and socialism—each of which in its own way promised liberation from age-old constraints. This tension inhered in the Socialist Car. The Socialist Car and Consumption In this book “socialism” has two meanings. One is the project to transform society from its bourgeois past to its Communist future, a project embarked upon and guided by a supposedly far-sighted political party and its apparatus acting on behalf of all nonantagonistic social groups. The other refers to those actually existing societies under such tutelage, societies confronting problems unforeseen in their ambiguity, complexity, and even contradictoriness. The procedures for the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services comprised a significant zone of interaction between the project and the actuality of socialism , between its ideals defined in terms of an enlightened awareness of the collective interest and the reality of shortages, competing priorities, external pressures, privilege, venality, and desires for imagined comforts, bourgeois or otherwise. Within this zone, the Socialist Car occupied an extremely important place. The Socialist Car was more than the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant and erstwhile models were fabricated ; it also absorbed East Europeans’longings and compromises,their hopes and disappointments.The Socialist Car thus can be situated at the point of convergence between the state and the private sphere. It embodied aspirations for overcoming the gap in technology between the capitalist and socialist worlds, as well as for enhancing personal mobility, flexibility, and status in the latter. It brought those who possessed one a little closer to an imagined West even as its own limitations and those imposed on it frustrated the fulfillment of those imaginings. Because the Socialist Car competed for resources with other modes of transportation, and because it had to cope with certain ideologically driven notions questioning its appropriateness to the socialist project, it had to adapt even as it provoked adaptation . The question...

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