Until now, “Miniature Curbside Classics from the Soviet Union” has been a one-item subcategory. This esoteric subcategory now doubles in size with this item, which was found in a dusty corner of a basement bookcase.
The car is a GAZ-A, a licensed Soviet copy of the Ford Model A. The Gorky Automobile Factory (Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod, or GAZ) has been one of Russia’s leading automobile producers since it started production in 1932. Started as a joint venture between the Soviet Union and the Ford Motor Company named Nizhegorodsky Avtomobilny Zavod (NAZ), after its location in the city of Nizhniy Novgorod, NAZ produced a Model A copy called the NAZ-A; in 1933, the names of both the factory and the car changed to GAZ and GAZ-A, respectively, when the city was renamed for the writer Maxim Gorky. The car’s Model A ancestry is readily apparent in its frontal aspect.
The GAZ-A was the first Soviet-made passenger car. It established GAZ as the Soviet Union’s main producer of cars for Communist Party officials who were important enough to rate a car but still below the top level of Party bosses. Later, GAZ would produce the GAZ M1, based on the Ford Model B; the GAZ 11, an independent design from 1942; the postwar M20 Pobieda (Victory); the M21 Volga, produced from 1956-1970 and considered a classic of the Soviet era (and best known in the U.S. as Vladimir Putin’s personal classic car); and the 1968-1992 M24 Volga which, as the quintessential car of the late Soviet era, was featured prominently in most movies set in Russia, including Goldeneye and The Bourne Supremacy.
GAZ also produced the Chaika–a car for higher-up Party officials that went through several post-1959 design generations–as well as many of the Red Army’s main military trucks. The highest-ranking Soviet officials used limousines, which had been made since 1936 by another enterprise first named ZIS, then ZIM and, finally, ZIL (Zavod imeni Stalina/Molotova/Likhacheva – Stalin/Molotov/Likhachev Factory).
The model is surprisingly solid and made of metal; the convertible top, windshield and tires are plastic. The interior is fairly well detailed, with a central instrument cluster and a gear lever cast in. (The gear lever looks far too short, but a full-length gear lever may have been too fragile for the model.) The ill-fitting doors are the only letdown, but they may be accurate renderings of actual 1930s GAZ build-quality deficiencies. Note that the seemingly gold-plated wire wheels and other brightwork in the above photos are a quirk of lighting; they’re actually chrome-colored on the model.
The model’s detailing extends to the undercarriage, although the Model A’s front and rear axle radius rods here are a bit chunkier than in real life–or were they beefed up to handle Russia’s primitive roads at the time?
Historical accuracy is better maintained on the box, which depicts a Party boss driving away from the smoke-spewing factory he rules with iron discipline as he leaves the proletarian factory workers in his dust.
The box also proudly proclaims the GAZ-A’s status as “The first Soviet light automobile. Produced by the Gorky Avtomobilny Zavod from 1932 to 1936.” Unlike the Benz Patent Motorwagen, whose claim to “first car” status elicited some vehement and highly-detailed opposition here, the GAZ-A’s status as the first Soviet-made passenger car is undisputed.
This particular miniature rolled off of its tiny assembly line in September 1991–only a few weeks after Boris Yeltsin defied an attempted coup by Soviet hard-liners, delivering his famous speech from atop a tank and bringing down the Soviet Union. It was bought off of a Moscow store shelf about a year and a half later.
It cost only 22 rubles – about 30 dollars, using the artificial exchange rate of the late 1980’s–but was quite a bargain in 1993, when the exchange rate was over 1000 rubles to the dollar. Like fur hats and other things that were ridiculously cheap in Russia at the time, I should have brought home a crate full of them back then.
What a fantastic little piece. The only one I’ve got it a Lada Niva keychain. It isn’t the best quality and about the size of the Hot Wheels.
I am not sure it was necessary to beef up the suspension of a Model A – American roads were plenty primitive in 1928, particularly in rural areas where most of the Ford dealers were. A very cool little model. I had understood that the A was produced in Russia, but knew nothing in any detail.
Model As were like a tractor with more seats beef it up why those things were as tough as nails
I don’t have any Russian models, though I do have a 1/18 scale Trabant 601S.
It’s a wonder that while all else was going to pieces in the USSR, they still had the time and resources to build models like this! As a funny happenstance I did a very similar post earlier this week about another Soviet-made toy car, check it out here!
AMAZING find! I had never heard of the Russo-Balt in my years of following the Soviet/Russian automobile world. Wikipedia has this to say about the production history of Russo-Balt:
“Russo-Baltic Wagon Corp.
The Russo-Baltic Wagon Factory (German: Russisch-Baltische Waggonfabrik; Russian: Русско-Балтийский вагонный завод, RBVZ) was founded in 1874 in Riga, then a major industrial centre of Russian Empire. Originally the new company was a subsidiary of the Van der Zypen & Charlier company in Cologne-Deutz, Germany. In 1894 the majority of its shares were sold to investors in Riga and St. Petersburg, among them local Baltic German merchants F. Meyer, K. Amelung, and Chr. Schroeder, as well as Schaje Berlin, a relative of Isaiah Berlin. The company eventually grew to 3,800 employees.[1] In 1915 the factory was evacuated to Russia.
Automobile manufacturing
Between 1909 and 1915 the cars were built at the railway car factory RBVZ. After the 1917 revolution a second factory was opened in St. Petersburg, where they built armoured cars on chassis produced in Riga. In 1922, the production was moved from St. Petersburg to BTAZ in Moscow. Russo-Balt produced trucks, buses and cars, often more or less copies of cars from the German Rex-Simplex or Belgian Fondu Trucks.”
So Russo-Balt should get credit for making cars first, but the Soviet Union and now Russians claiming GAZ as the first Soviet/Russian carmaker is valid. Russo-Balt was a transplant while GAZ was clearly domestic. Furthermore, GAZ was mass producing cars while Russo-Balt made them in only very small numbers.
Even more interesting, Russo-Balt was where helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky got started:
“Airplane manufacturing
In early 1912 company director M. V. Shidlovsky hired 22-year-old Igor Sikorsky as the chief engineer for RBVZ’s new aircraft division in St. Petersburg. Sikorsky’s airplane had recently won a military aircraft competition in Moscow. He brought several engineers with him to RBVZ, and agreed that the company would own his designs for the next five years.
This group quickly produced a series of airplanes. Among these were the S-7, S-9, S-10 (1913), S-11, S-12, S-16 (1915), S-20 (1916), Russky Vityaz (The Grand) (1913), a series named Il’ya Muromets starting in 1913,[2] and the Alexander Nevsky (1916).
Relatedly, in 1914, Shidlovsky was appointed commander of the newly formed EVK (“Eskadra vozdushnykh korablei”), or Squadron of Flying Ships. This squadron flew Il’ya Muromets bombers during World War One.
The Bolshevik Revolution brought an end to the aircraft business. Sikorsky left for France in 1918.[3] Shidlovsky and his son were arrested in 1919, while attempting to go to Finland, and were murdered.[4]”
Back to the miniature cars, the common origins of this GAZ-A and your Russo-Balt model are obvious: the construction of the miniatures is similar, and on the boxes, the font and the artwork style are the same.
Thank you for finding and presenting this find.
And here is a translation of the text on the box:
Scale Model Automobile for Collectors
Russo-Balt S 24/30
With “Landolet (Landaulet)” Body
1910
Russ-Balt S 24/30
With “Double-Faeton (Phaeton)” Body
1909
Manufactured in the city of Riga in a Russian-Baltic factory
Here’s my miniature GAZ … a GAZ 21 (Volga) that my son brought home from Moscow last year.
Nice Volga model, although I wonder whether the color choice was influenced by Vladimir Putin’s personal GAZ-21:
This model was actually available in two colors according to the lineup on the back side of the box, the other being a bluish-green. It’s a “Nash Avtoprom” (“nash as in “our”, not the American car of yore) model and they show 11 other cars, each in two colors on the back of the box, plus the URL which I hadn’t checked out till now …. there is some more really nice stuff including trucks and “sports cars” (ZIS 101). The Volga is very well-done, with individual chrome mirrors, dog-dish hubcaps, even stand up hood ornament all in 1/43 scale. As near as I can interpret from the packaging it’s actually made in Macao. Check out nashavtoprom.ru
Neat story.
My grand parents would bring me toy cars from far off lands whenever they would go on a trip, I have a RHD Japanese first gen RX7 with functioning pop up lights and the funky mirrors way out on the front fenders.
I’ve got a Russo-Balt in maroon. I don’t remember if it’s a landaulet like Timothy’s or a touring car, though. It’s in a box in the basement together with a late model Volga done up in police livery and a Lada, IIRC.
Maybe I should start digging and write up a Miniature Curbside Classic.