Introducing the new 1967 "Hucmpy"! Da!

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H' I chust noticetuh

dat dey haf Gorky Park minx hatz on in zee car picthure, chust like in zuh moofee. AMAZINK!
 
Phil:

The ZIL you show is a 111-G, introduced in '62 and made through '67. It had the Cadillac/Chrysler resemblance up front, but it was somewhat Mercury-like in the back. It's a very rare car, with only 26 units produced.

Here's a Wikipedia article on the 111 series, which it turns out was Packard-inspired. What's odd is that the inspiration is a number of years behind its American origins; the first 111 from 1958 is a very fair copy of the 1955-56 Packard Caribbean, right down to the peaked headlight nacelles and the egg-crate grille:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIL-111
 
fido,

yep probably only 10-15 ladas in the whole US,about half of them nivas.If "lada usa"site would have been around back when i got the 2107 i would have been able to get the parts to fix up the "zhiguli"a lot of fiat parts also fit,but the russian engine is different from production fiat.Lada was sold in canada 1979-98;"zhiguli"RWD cars,niva 4x4,samara FWD cars.
 
Jon:

There was a little interchange between the two countries, more than a lot of people knew. First, high-ranking people often had access to American appliances, imported especially for them. There was actually a Soviet need for this kind of financial exchange - unbeknownst to Commie-hating types like Senator McCarthy, Godless Russia was one of the main sources of chromium, on which Detroit styling of the day was totally dependent.

There was also the famed American exhibition of 1959 in Moscow, from which that famous photo of Nixon and Khrushchev shown above is taken. GM had an exhibit in the show, and distributed Russian-language brochures, which are very rare today. You can see one online at the Old Car Manual Project. Strange to see such familiar cars described in Cyrillic characters! What the good comrades thought of such outlandish vehicles is, I think, lost to history:

http://www.tocmp.com/brochures/GM/1959/Russian/1959GMFulllinebrochure/1959_gm_27.html
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Jon:

I don't know who illustrated the brochure, but I can tell you that it was produced here in the U.S. by GM and shipped to Moscow for the exhibition - it is not Soviet work or printing.

If you want some major midcentury entertainment, Google "1959 american exhibition moscow" sometime. It was purpose-built, designed by George Nelson, had a film by Charles and Ray Eames, and was stuffed with American art like Jackson Pollock paintings, as well as American consumer goodies, contributed by manufacturers (Congress was stingy with the budget, so the private sector jumped in and turned a measly government show into an extravaganza).

The purpose of the film was to prove to Soviet visitors that all the goods shown were commonplaces of American life, not propaganda articles produced especially for the show.

The Russians loved it.
 
Finally, one showing a '67 Riviera almost like mine! (the picture was reversed so it shows the steering and emblem on the hood the wrong side!)

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Louis,

My belly can't stopppit wigglink.

 

Tankee

 

All those consonants. No wonder they drank so much wodka: they're jaws were jammed.

 

Love,

 

Hucmpy
 
Phil

What a cool brochure, I love that drafting room! Those windows are huge, it would make the room restful; and the daylight must have been a real pleasure to work under!

Today they are all on monitors in closer quarters so they can see those monitors, I bet.

 

 

I must photo the State Refrigerator Manual and put that up.

 

 
 
Soviet Color TV:

"i have heard the russians were especially fascinated with color TVs demonstrated at the US exhibit"

They only had to wait a few years - the USSR got its first color broadcasts on October 1, 1967, just a few months after the U.K. launched color service in July of that year. There had been experimental stuff going on for quite a few years prior to that. It took color a long time to catch on in the USSR; sets were expensive and as with everything else, high-ranking party officials got top priority.

Another problem was that Soviet TVs had quite a tendency to explode. For a while there, the majority of USSR household fires were caused by television fires and explosions.
 
Hi Jon Charles,

 

    Thank you for posting cyrillic brochures. I am 1/4 white Russian. My grandmother came from St. Petersburg BEFORE the revolution. My father spoke Russian and was raised in the Russian Orthodox Church. After my parents married, my mother's Massachusetts background predominated and we are all Episcopalian.  I have always wondered what Russian would have been like if there had been no revolution. What kind of washers would they have had? I am fascinated by Russia and someday hope to go. And here is a link to a Russian Twin Tub.

 

Ross

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ross

http://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?36185
 
A good friend of ours from Britain that lives here married a Russian woman. She looks like she should be from Sweden, tall blonde blue eyed. She came to the US after they were married.

What did she do before the CCCP crashed? She was an aircraft designer at the Tupolev design center. When she came here she knew almost no english, 6 months later she was conversing at the conversational level. Just amazing. She enrolled at U of H and her first semester got straight A's, even in a Calculus class. Her teacher asked her how she was doing so well. She told him that the stuff he is teaching is taught in the second year of high school in Russia.

The standard of living in Russia, especially the big cities is rapidly closing in on the standard of living we enjoy here in the USA. A lot of American companies are scrambling to place product in Russia.

If nobody else can get those images translated, I probably can.
 
oo Allen

I'd like to meet her! I know Russian schools and Bulgarian schools press Math early and often and they teach it well too.
In 1969 my Dad gave a lecture at the Academy of Science in Moscow. In return his host Mazurin was invited to return to here for a lecture and tour. He was coming with his wife and son ,but a week before a high level Scientist defected to the west and so we were informed he would be coming with two "scientists" instead of his family. They all stayed with us and the "scientists" weren't really scientists and dropped the pretense after two days at breakfast. Suddenly with out warning they were speaking perfect english when they asked my mother to "pass the pancakes'! And told her how "comfortable the chairs were"!

They were along to make sure Mazurin would be easily returning to the Soviet Union.

Ross, take a peek at my FB page today, you might enjoy reading up on some Russian history I garnered from Wikipedia and Russiapedia!
 
Packard and Russia

Apparently it is a myth that Packard supplied their 1942 dies to the Russians. A few years ago the Packard Cormorant magazine (the club publication, I've been a member since 1977) ran an article by a Finnish collector who was able to directly compare a '42 Packard with a ZIS limousine and found that the dimensions, such as the radiuses of the curves, were different. Clearly the Russians copied the general design closely, so much so that differences are not obvious to the naked eye. But the story is just too good to go away.
 
John:

I've heard the story debunked before, and there are still people who disagree with the debunking. Do you have any links you could point us to for more info on this?

P.S.: My ultimate fantasy car is a '42 Super 8 Custom One-Eighty LeBaron limousine with the factory air. Don't want much, do I?
 
Lol, Sandy, the only online references I could find go back to magazine articles, so I scanned a piece from the Cormorant, Spring 2004, by George Hamlin, a distinguished Packard collector and historian. It's been a long time since I scanned anything and I no longer know what I'm doing, but here goes.

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