Volga (colloquial: the Barge; in estate body — the Barn) — a mid-size passenger automobile of the GAZ marque.
One of the most recognizable symbols of developed socialism.
In the Soviet era it was used to operate taxi services, while specially built Volgas with tuned engines and reinforced drivetrains were mass-produced for ferrying the Party elite and equipping the motor pools of the security services.
The principal models are the GAZ-21, GAZ-24, and GAZ-31.
The essence of the phenomenon
Under Soviet power, the Volga brand always kept company with reality. "Volga" meant real power, real money, and a real dream that the most ambitious pursued in their lifetimes.
The designers' obvious deference to Russian roads, built into the very structure of the car, made the Volga exceptionally reliable in virtually any conditions. The understanding that, given Russian production volumes, it had to last forever turned it into the ideal European taxi.
The car was successfully exported to 75 countries, and foreign diesel engines were fitted to it as well. It was nicknamed "the tank" — on the occasion of its anniversary, Gorky residents recalled with fond nostalgia that during trials in Belgium a Volga had overturned a small tram.
Export continued successfully until the mid-1950s.
Historical background
The beginning — the Volga GAZ-21
On 15 October 1956, the first batch of Volgas rolled off the line — automobiles of the Thaw era, which always signified success.
Work on the Volga began in 1953 at GAZ under the direction of designer Alexander Nevzorov. The Gorky engineers already had the homegrown Pobeda to their credit, along with the recently launched ZIM, plus several conceptual designs. The new car received a slightly boosted version of the Pobeda's 2.45-litre engine producing 70 horsepower, a new unibody sedan body, and a five-seat interior. The first prototypes were assembled and tested in 1955.
It was an interesting time: whereas before the country had changed only gradually and imperceptibly, by 1956 change had broken into a gallop. In February, Khrushchev delivered his speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, denounced Stalin's cult of personality, and the psychological dam burst: the country set about rehabilitating, celebrating, reveling, going to festivals, heading south, and spending money. The film Carnival Night created a cult of the party; the film Forty-First all but legalized sex — and between a Red Army woman and a White Guard officer at that. The new automobile simply had to look joyful, unscowling, and dynamic. The Volga, work on which had begun in 1953, did not disappoint.
The design was led by Lev Eremeev. The car was conceived as thoroughly stylish: the impetuosity of the silhouette was accentuated by the combination of a leaping-deer hood ornament, a chrome molding, and a roof-mounted antenna centered along the roofline, while the sense of speed was reinforced by the body lines, the decorative contour of the rear fender, and the sloping trunk lid. To this was added the airy quality of the seemingly swollen body, completed by a cabin with curved glass. The dashboard trim recalled the interiors of prestigious marques, and the two-tone paintwork — especially sea-foam green with ivory, as seen on Crimean boulevards — was something straight out of a fashion magazine. In short: America, but in European proportions. And in fact, that was precisely what it was. Even under late Stalin, it had become fashionable in the USSR to live beautifully, as in the books about tasty and wholesome food. Meanwhile, the United States had entered its second Prosperity — big cars and big houses, brightly colored dresses and Technicolor cinema.
In the fifties the Soviet elite began ostentatiously imitating the habits of that American Prosperity, which was sometimes amusing and sometimes not entirely without merit. In any case, the Volga was endowed with a fine "big style" that still holds up today. The designers made an honest attempt to give the car an innovative engine as well, but it never delivered. Even so, the engineers tried to add certain flourishes to the existing setup — among them a centralized lubrication system operated from inside the cabin, which shamelessly broke down and leaked. And an automatic transmission remained a base-equipment option right up to the end (a few hundred Volgas with automatics were actually built, but the service network clearly could not cope, and the automatic was "pulled from the production line"). Yet the main focus of the designers' creative efforts went into the qualities that would earn the "Twenty-One" its reputation abroad. The longevity of the Volga body was achieved through advanced technology: the "red horse" was immersed in a special bath for priming, and beforehand the body was treated chemically so that a phosphate film formed on the metal, protecting it from corrosion.
It was indeed a reliable and durable car, though underpowered for its class and thirsty on fuel. It was a genuine status symbol, initially seeming quite attainable (5,000 new rubles). Sadly, the Volga had one melancholy trait. It was already obsolete the day it was born. Since frequent model changes were out of the question, the only salvation for the domestic motor industry would have been to stay ahead of the curve. With the Pobeda, this had worked in terms of styling: it was several years ahead of the Saab, the Standard, the Lancia, and the DKW, and its clean, unbroken flanks — unmarked by separate fender arches — became a hallmark of the modern automobile only much later. The 1956 Volga, by contrast, had nothing original to offer by world standards. Its infatuation with Prosperity played a cruel trick. The Volga became wedded to the already-fading streamlined style of early-1950s American sedans. That style lingered in Europe, to be sure, but even there it was overshadowed by trail-blazing newcomers such as the Citroën DS. And by the early sixties everything had pivoted toward the crisp and angular, and the Volga was swiftly relegated to retro status. From that point on, our motor industry generally worked not with its own future but with someone else's present — and naturally ended up in the past. This tardiness has a rather entertaining winged echo. In the mid-1960s the Kharkov Automobile and Road Institute designed, and the Severodonetsk Auto Repair Plant built, minibuses called "Start" on Volga running gear — featuring enormous tailfins in the most extreme incarnation of "Detroit Baroque." The vehicle looked all the more amusing because in Detroit itself they had been abandoning fins for about five years already. But in the film *Kidnapping, Caucasian Style* that romanticism was entirely fitting. One way or another, the winged Start carried Natalya Varley off toward a bright tomorrow and away from the decent engineer Shurik. The production life of the Volga GAZ-21 came to an end in 1970. By that point more than 630,000 Volgas had worthily enriched the landscape of the country's cities. Alexander Andrievsky
1970s: The Volga GAZ-24
In the mid-1960s the third postwar generation of passenger cars appeared on the streets of Soviet cities. The models created during those years would form the backbone of every domestic car plant's production program for decades to come. The first to arrive, in 1964, was the Moskvich 408, which amazed motoring enthusiasts with an engine output unprecedented for a domestic small car — a twin-choke carburetor delivering 50 hp, matching the output of the mid-class Pobeda that was still doing taxi duty — and a genuinely fresh design, even by Western standards. In the bumper crop year of 1967, it was joined by the Moskvich 412, fitted with an entirely new BMW-type engine producing 75 hp, a power output remarkable even among imported cars of that class; a variant of the same car built in Izhevsk; the elegant, representative ZIL-114; and the new Zaporozhets ZAZ-966, nicknamed by the public "the eared one." In 1969 the first LuAZ 969s rolled off the line at the newly built Lutsk car plant — the country's only production front-wheel-drive vehicles and the first domestic off-roaders available for official purchase. That same year the Moskvich received a new body, more modern in appearance and meeting all the passive-safety requirements of the era.
Finally, the very end of the decade was marked by two major events simultaneously — the launch of new VAZ small cars in Togliatti, and the renewal of the Gorky Automobile Plant's passenger-car lineup.
The new Volga had been a long time coming. Launched into series production almost simultaneously with the famous Citroën DS (1956), the "Twenty-One" Volga, with its characteristic mid-1950s styling, had begun to show signs of obsolescence as early as the early 1960s. By American standards, strictly speaking, the first-generation Volga already looked like a technical antique by the late 1950s — though in those years even a three-year-old car was considered ancient over there.
In Europe, models developed during the same period lasted longer. The Ford Consul (Britain), for example, which bore a visual resemblance to the Volga, was in production from 1956 to 1962; the equivalent generation of Opels — the Kapitän — ran from 1958 to 1963. Tellingly, in both cases they gave way to fundamentally different, contemporary-by-the-standards-of-the-time replacements.
At home, a substantial restyling of the GAZ-21 was carried out in 1962. Despite minimal changes to the bodywork itself, the modernized Volga looked more dynamic and noticeably more contemporary — even somewhat futuristic by the standards of the day. But modernization could not make the tall body (1,620 mm) and the narrow-track chassis dating from 1954 look modern.
Although the car sold reasonably well even in Western Europe right up to the end of its production run — the Western press described it as "built to last forever," and domestically it had no competition whatsoever — work on its replacement had already begun at the factory as early as 1960.
Unlike, say, the Moskvich — whose models succeeded one another on the assembly line in a "gradual" manner, with transitional versions appearing first (old body, updated mechanicals), then a new body, and so on — at the Gorky plant in those years the practice was to engineer new generations of cars from scratch, with no or limited carryover of components from previous models. The production Twenty-One shared virtually no major assemblies with the Pobeda; the only fully common component was arguably the gearbox, and even that had been substantially revised. The Chaika GAZ-13 was likewise developed without reference to its predecessor, the GAZ-12 ZiM.
Consequently, while the GAZ-21's contemporary, the Citroën DS, underwent a radical mid-life update around the turn of the decade that allowed it to pass, notionally, as a car of the 1970s (it remained in production until 1976), at Gorky the same period brought a complete replacement of the entire model range — which by that time comprised a sedan, an estate, an ambulance, and a high-performance V8-engined variant.
Early Development
This event was preceded by a lengthy preparatory process. The first attempt to develop a successor to the GAZ-21 was undertaken by the plant's design team on their own initiative as early as 1960.
At that time, both ordinary Soviet citizens and the designers themselves were under the spell of the exhibits at the 1959 American industrial exhibition in Moscow — the first and last of its kind — at which all the major models on the North American market for the 1959 model year had been on display. It is therefore no surprise that the project for a prospective second-generation Volga that they produced (developed as far as a full-size clay model) combined features from many transatlantic cars of the era. Most notably — setting aside the front-end treatment — it referenced a specific model: the 1959 Ford, though of course our model did not look like a copy of it.
Individual features of the 1959 Chevrolet and Pontiac (front end), Mercury (bumpers), and others were also discernible. On the whole, however, the model possessed a sufficient degree of individuality and merely echoed certain characteristic styling details of American cars of those years rather than reproducing them wholesale.
To judge by this model, the car was intended to use a hardtop body — a convertible-style sedan without a B-pillar — typical of American cars of that era but very rarely seen on the other side of the Atlantic (what this looks like in practice can be seen in the image of the green Ford at left). The mechanicals were evidently envisaged as an updated version of those from the GAZ-21, which at that point had not yet become outdated.
On the whole, the car looked fairly fresh and contemporary (fins had not entirely gone out of fashion even in America at that point), and by European standards it was positively avant-garde. But in the States themselves the style had already changed the following year.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that the Moskvich 408 was being developed from 1959 onward and likewise did not escape the influence of "Detroit Baroque" — witness, for instance, the shape of the rear roof pillar, which on the 408 almost replicates the Volga clay model. Though overall the 408 looked European, and it did actually make it into production.
The styling of American cars of those years turned out, however, to be "transitional" and did not endure, yielding to the typical style of the 1960s (and in Europe it had virtually no equivalent to begin with). Besides, the plant had no capacity at that time to put a new car into production — the late 1950s had only just seen it get the mass production of the Twenty-One sorted out and up to plan targets. It is therefore most likely that this clay model was built with no expectation of mass production — in what one might call an exploratory capacity. The hardtop body was also very nearly a non-starter for production (not suited to our roads — it would only work on a smooth highway). In those years GAZ built quite a few concept cars, so to speak — for example, the GAZ-18 invalid car (1958) with a semi-automatic hydromechanical transmission, developed in full knowledge that its chances of entering production were close to zero.
Now imagine what the modern Volga would have been if GAZ had derived it from something like this, the way it derived it from the GAZ-24… However that may be, the original and handsome but somewhat untimely project remained known only to a narrow circle of specialists.
Incidentally, a similar fate befell the ZAZ-966, which had been developed as early as the beginning of the 1960s: owing to funding problems and delays in getting it into the production plan, it only entered series production in 1967!
Yet the problem of the M-21's obsolescence remained very real. And Western dealers were beginning to drop hints — the car was good, especially for the money, but the design really ought to be updated for it to sell well in the West. The Soviet state needed hard currency; that was no secret. And so it was worth paying attention to the foreign market and its demands and tastes — particularly given the decent sales figures for the GAZ-21, even if they owed much to its rock-bottom price.
Accordingly, official work on a machine to replace the M-21 began at the plant in 1961. A. M. Nevzorov (1925–2005) was appointed chief engineer for the project. The designers (or, as they were called at the time, artist-engineers) of the new car were young designers L. I. Tsikolenko and N. I. Kireyev. It should be noted that the car was not yet called the GAZ-24. It was not even clear, apparently, whether it would carry the Volga name.
Design work was conducted from the outset around four engine options: a 2.5-liter aluminum four-cylinder based on the GAZ-21 engine (intended primarily, it seems, for taxi use); a V6 of 3 liters (the base unit); a V8 of 5.53 liters (a special version for the KGB); and a four-cylinder diesel (for Europe, where diesel Volgas were popular with taxi drivers — based on the export experience of the GAZ-21, an imported unit was envisaged).
The V6 (2.99 liters, 136 hp) in variants 24-14 (cast-iron block) and 24-18 (aluminum block), originally planned as the base engine, never progressed beyond the experimental stage by the time series production began; it was planned to develop it in parallel with production during a second phase of work on the car. But in the early 1970s oil prices shot up sharply, and in those circumstances a three-liter engine for a mid-class car was evidently deemed excessive. The remaining engines were realized to varying degrees.
Subsequently GAZ made repeated attempts to fit the Volga with an imported six-cylinder engine — BMW, Mercedes, Ford, and PRV units were tried, both straight-six and V6 configurations — but again, none of these efforts went beyond the experimental stage, despite the fact that a six-cylinder engine is the most natural choice for a car of this class.
The base four-cylinder engine had a thoroughly substantial displacement (2.5 liters), comparable to imported six-cylinder units. The ZMZ engines were by no means the largest four-cylinders of their day, of course. The Pontiacs that were roughly comparable to the Volga in the early 1960s, for instance, were fitted with a 3.2-liter four-cylinder that, like the Volga's, lacked balance shafts. At that displacement, however, the Pontiac engine was extremely sensitive to tuning and vibrated severely, and it was abandoned fairly quickly. The Soviet "big-bore four" was likewise far from smooth in operation, but no replacement for it could be found at the time.
The intended base configuration featured a four-speed manual gearbox with close-ratio gears and a floor-mounted gear lever — in line with the latest trends in automotive engineering. It was also planned, at long last, to develop an automatic transmission version. A column-shift variant was developed but did not enter production. Additionally, versions with a three-speed manual transmission and a semi-automatic overdrive (an additional ratio, like a fifth gear in modern gearboxes, but built as a separate unit) were planned. Manual gearboxes were originally envisaged for the taxi variant. In practice, only the four-speed manual with a floor lever survived — as the simplest, cheapest, most fuel-efficient option and the one most in keeping with the standard of world (predominantly European) automotive engineering.
Particular attention was paid to the car's design, which was important both for good export sales and for slowing the process of visual obsolescence (as experience with the GAZ-21 had shown). As a result, the car's styling was revised several times during the design process, in keeping with a fashion that had itself changed repeatedly over the development period. No fewer than six full-size exploratory clay models were built — as I. Paderin notes in his monograph "21," the development of the Twenty-Four followed an extensive path (the GAZ-21 had made do with a single model variant, which happened to be highly successful from the outset).
Active work on the new car's exterior continued in practice from 1961 to 1965. And so, step by step, the familiar appearance of the defining Soviet car of the 1970s and 1980s took shape (images of the clay models and sketches are taken from Ivan Paderin's celebrated book "21"):
The earliest variants were fairly archaic in appearance; some of them more closely resembled a deep restyle of the M-21 than a new design. The car shown in the very first sketch betrays the Twenty-One, merely "squared off" and given twin headlights and a front end in the manner of that same 1959 Ford (it evidently made a strong impression on the factory's designers), while the overall design also recalls certain American models of the "late aerospace" era — 1959–60 (the sketch apparently traces its origins to the very earliest studies).
As development continued, the car began to look more contemporary, and the appearance of the successive models reflects the trajectory of world automotive design during those years — from the "transitional" style of the late 1950s and early 1960s, with its certain exoticism of form, toward the classical style of the mid-to-late sixties (the so-called linear constructivism). Some individual prototypes resembled specific American models; others evoked a composite image of "a modern American car"; still others recalled very little at all.
The openly pro-American orientation of the GAZ-24's developers and designers should come as neither a surprise nor a cause for question. The fact is that in those years Europe produced virtually no cars in the Volga's class. Among those that did exist, the large Opels had been drawn — quite openly drawn — from the American Chevrolet range (the two brands were, and remain, part of the same company, General Motors); Mercedes was likewise looking toward the United States and was in the most literal sense "growing fins," while also possessing an excessively distinctive, conservative, and instantly recognizable design that made using it as a reference point pointless. The luxury marques Facel Vega and Rolls-Royce were also making moves in the direction of American style, even adopting American-made components — the former bought its engines and automatic transmissions from Chrysler, the latter from Cadillac, a fact that in the United States gave rise to a great many sharp jokes about a "Caddy that went to Cambridge."
Other European manufacturers gave no thought whatsoever to building cars of that size. Ford's largest European model was considerably smaller than the Volga under development (among domestic models it was closest in class to the Moskvich-2141). BMW until the end of the 1960s specialized in small cars and sports cars. Volvo spent most of the 1960s producing the outdated PV family — stylistically analogous to the Pobeda — alongside the more modern but still highly conservative Volvo Amazon, which in styling terms was close to the GAZ-21.
In those years, then, North American manufacturers were virtually the sole players in this car class, and following their lead was the surest way to create a modern and successful automobile.
1961–62
A period of searching for form, during which very little foreshadowed the final result. Countless sketches were drawn in an effort to "feel out" the compositional appearance of the future car (some of them can be seen on the walls of the room, including sketches of a car largely replicating one of the clay models but with an estate body) and full-size models were built. The designers had no shortage of time — production of the M-21 was still in full swing, and work on its modernization was continuing in parallel.
1962 proved productive. Particularly promising was one of the prototypes (lower two photos at left) with modern, rectilinear lines and a characteristically styled radiator grille. For 1962, this variant looked remarkably fresh and original, ahead of even the majority of American models. Many of its features were developed further. As on the earlier variants, the roofline follows the Moskvich pattern with a panoramic rear window. This detail subsequently went out of fashion, and on later sketches the roof acquired the familiar solid thick rear pillar of American counterparts.
In the appearance of some of the prototypes, features of the future Twenty-Four can already be discerned: the "whale-whisker" radiator grille, the twin-headlamp lighting system, the flat symmetrical instrument panel of very simple form (designed to facilitate a right-hand-drive version), the theme of a character line along the flank, and the forward-pointing V-shaped leading edge of the front wings — though at this stage the radiator grille was not yet V-shaped in profile.
1963–65
The years 1963–64 were arguably the turning point for the Volga. By that time it had become definitively clear, on the one hand, that the GAZ-21 design had reached the end of its potential and that nothing fundamentally new could be wrung from it; and on the other, the appearance of the M-24 in its final form was beginning gradually to emerge:
As can be seen, many features of the future GAZ-24 are already present: bumpers of the characteristic simple form, the characteristic wheel arch shape, the V-shaped radiator grille theme, the pressed line on the hood, and so on.
A sketch from 1964–65. The complex, sculptured front-end form characteristic of this sketch — with prominent flanking surfaces projecting forward and deeply recessed headlamps, popular at the time in America — would have been beyond our manufacturer's technical capabilities to produce.
In parallel, the car's mechanical components were being developed — the engine, suspension, and transmission. In automotive design, designers (artist-engineers) and engineers normally work in parallel and independently of one another, working from a design brief and a so-called "layout sketch," which defines the principal dimensions, lines, and proportions of the future car (showing the outlines of the powertrain, radiator, transmission components, wheels, floorpan, and the preliminary general lines of the roof, hood, trunk lid, windshield, rear window, and front and rear overhang angles — in short, everything that must remain fixed regardless of the car's styling).
Alongside the design of the car itself, work was underway to prepare for its production. Compared to the previous model, the new Volga incorporated structurally more complex assemblies, and requirements for manufacturing precision and quality had risen substantially. Accordingly, the country's first investment-casting shop was commissioned in 1962, followed by the country's first automated sand-casting line. New facilities were built: a tooling and die plant (1967) and a gearbox plant (1968).
Finally, in the 1965 prototypes, the car — which by this time had at last received its historic designation, albeit still as the M-24 — already looked very much like itself.
In the end, the engineers found solutions that allowed them, on the one hand, to follow the current of American and world design while, on the other, giving the new Volga the necessary degree of individuality and originality — creating its distinctive, recognizable appearance, which the generally rather anonymous early prototypes had lacked. The car's design was characterized by austere simplicity of form, which allowed it to age gracefully over a long period, while at the same time possessing a pronounced sense of dynamism, achieved through a beltline that swept gently downward toward the rear, thrown into sharp contrast by a straight character line, and through the V-shaped treatment of the body's extremities.
Throughout further development, the car's appearance changed very little, though the designers did toy with the grille a bit more, fitting the car with either two or four headlights at various stages. In the end, however, they settled on the familiar, "canonical" look — two headlights and a picket fence of vertical "whalebone" slots, as on the late GAZ-21 — a configuration that would remain until 1984, and in practice until the very end of production (they used whatever was left in stock). The designers were also slow to settle on the wheel covers: certain experimental units were fitted with full-disc hubcaps resembling those later used on the GAZ-3102 (1982). The production version, however, went with standard plain hubcaps — the so-called "dog-dish" (dogdish hubcaps). I have no information on the interiors of the prototypes; there may well have been variations there too. The photographs show only a flat instrument panel and what appears to be a front bench seat — whether it was solid or folding, I cannot say.
Running Prototypes
In 1966, the first genuinely drivable prototypes appeared, bearing — apart from a few details — the look of the production cars.
In principle, everything was ready for the start of series production. Avtoexport triumphantly announced to foreign buyers that a new Soviet car was coming to replace the GAZ-21 — a declaration that proved rather rash, since actual volume production was still a full three years away, during which time GAZ-21 sales suffered badly as Western buyers waited for the new model.
On 5 July 1967, the Six-Day War broke out between the Arab League and Israel, a conflict that effectively escalated into a continuous armed confrontation still ongoing today. The USSR supported the Arabs with money, military hardware, and military advisers. A great deal of resources was directed toward this effort, to the detriment of domestic programs — including the generational changeover of vehicles at the Gorky Automobile Plant. This is, of course, only one interpretation…
In addition, the Volga Automobile Plant then under construction undoubtedly exerted a very significant influence on the distribution of funding for the automotive industry, absorbing enormous sums of money.
In this way, the creation of VAZ was in large part responsible for the subsequent lag of the domestic automotive industry: VAZ itself was producing a foreign design that was already obsolete, and the generational turnover at the other plants was severely delayed by its construction.
The first more-or-less production GAZ-M-24 units were assembled only in 1968 — just 31 cars in total.
The assembly line was not started until late 1969, with only 215 vehicles completed before year's end. Notably, these cars apparently no longer had wing-mounted rear-view mirrors. This feature seems to have been confined to the experimental models and was found inconvenient during testing (one photograph of a prototype shows the wing mirrors removed, with only the mounting brackets remaining — evidently the test drivers were not pleased with them).
It was only on 15 April 1970 that the last first-generation Volga — a GAZ-21US in "anthracite" — rolled out through the factory gates, after which the GAZ-24, the "twenty-four," became the undisputed queen of the GAZ passenger-car line. It had by then been overripe in terms of design by several years, yet calling a car from 1970–75 "outdated" is going too far — even in developed countries, far more antiquated vehicles were being stamped out at the time. The car entered production under its final designation GAZ-24 (without the "M"), giving rise to the joke that GAZ model numbers were determined by the nearest Party Congress. In reality, the gap in GAZ's model range — skipping "23" (GAZ-21, 22 estate, then 24) — was due to the existence of a little-known modification, the GAZ-23 (1962–70), based on the GAZ-21 and fitted with a high-output eight-cylinder engine and an automatic transmission. The "M" prefix had disappeared from production Volga designations back in 1965, after the final facelift of the GAZ M-21, following which the base variant was redesignated GAZ-21R.
By the end of 1970, just over 18,000 cars had been built. Output grew year on year, eventually reaching approximately 30,000–35,000 vehicles annually. Over its 22-year production run, GAZ manufactured a total of 1,481,561 cars of this model across all variants (a figure that invites many questions depending on what exactly is counted and how) — making it the most-produced model in the plant's history (it was also, not coincidentally, in production longer than any other).
By world automotive standards, this was an extremely limited output. In America, in just ONE year — 1965 — more than a million examples were built of a single model, the Chevrolet Impala, a full-size car that was by no means cheap. And for a car of the Volga's class, such production volumes were considered perfectly normal over there.
This makes it easy to understand why a Volga was virtually impossible to buy in those days: output was tightly limited, and the bulk of it went to taxi fleets, government agencies through the allocation system, and export — leaving a pitiful trickle for the domestic retail market, for which people joined long queues. Estate versions were sold only to large families, for hard currency at Beryozka stores, or by special permit (Yuri Nikulin, for example, was allowed to purchase an estate for transporting heavy circus equipment).
Incidentally, around 70,000–80,000 Volgas are now produced per year — still a modest figure, but roughly matching the number of buyers who want them, so that until the recent crisis every car found a buyer. Peak output came in the mid-1990s, when production reached up to a hundred thousand cars a year — though, as is well known, quality suffered badly as a result.
Taxi
In 1971, a five-seat taxi variant, the GAZ-24-01, appeared (taxis were predominantly lemon-yellow, though they came in any colour up to and including black), fitted with a detuned engine for running on A-76 petrol (the ZMZ-24-01), a taximeter, and leatherette seat upholstery. The first GAZ-24-01 taxicabs appeared in taxi depots as early as 1969 for evaluation purposes.
Drivers accustomed to the "twenty-first" Volgas were not quick to appreciate the new car's advantages. But the substantially reduced maintenance volume and labour requirement, the livelier performance, the roomier and more comfortable interior, the modern appearance, and numerous other benefits soon changed their minds.
Estate
From 1972, the large seven- or eight-seat estate GAZ-24-02 was also put into production, with a very well-thought-out interior layout: three rows of seats, with the two rear rows of simplified construction that could fold flat to create a level, practical load area — an arrangement found on many modern cars, such as the Opel Zafira. In 1973, an ambulance variant, the GAZ-24-03, was developed on the estate platform.
High-Speed Variant
At the end of 1973, with little fanfare, the limited-production V8 variant planned since the design stage also entered production — built primarily for KGB use and designated "Article 2424." A genuine muscle car in the American sense, though not quite as extravagantly powerful ("only" 5.5 litres and 195 hp, versus 6–7.5 litres and 300–400 hp — admittedly often in a heavier car).
Conclusion
Despite the delays in reaching production, the Volga was, at the time of its appearance, broadly on a par with its European counterparts in terms of styling, even if it was somewhat behind them in engineering terms. Among American models of the same years, one can find near-direct equivalents both in appearance and in mechanical layout. In the second half of the 1970s, however, European expectations of a car in this class shifted sharply, and the Volga began to date quickly. In America, comparable models continued into the late 1970s — the Plymouth equivalent was built from 1967 to 1976, the Chevrolet from 1967 to 1979. Nor did the GAZ-24 look out of place alongside the models that replaced them.
Looking at well-preserved examples of the GAZ-24 from the first series (1968/70–77/78), and to some extent the second (from 1977/78), and comparing them with foreign equivalents of the same vintage, one realizes that there was a time when our automotive industry produced genuinely modern, quality cars that were competitive even on export markets.
Stories About Volgas
Mikhail Boyarsky
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The story of how I came to own my Volga is a simple one. My uncle is a People's Artist of Russia; he was entitled to a Volga but had no intention of driving it.
A black Volga in those days was the ultimate. Above it there was only the Chayka. Or the confiscated Mercedes that had begun appearing at the time — Yefremov had one, Evstigneev had one, Vysotsky too. The story of how I came to own that Volga is a simple one. My uncle is a People's Artist of Russia; he was entitled to a Volga but had no intention of driving it. No point letting a good thing go to waste — so the nephew went to the Gorky Automobile Plant in his uncle's place. Alexander Kolker, a seasoned car owner (a well-known composer and Volga owner himself), advised me to bring along a few sticks of hard-to-find sausage, some of my records, and some posters. And right he was: in The City of Gorky, we got into a completely wild drinking session with the director, the deputy directors, the foremen, and the workers. The Soviet automotive giant itself struck me as something resembling a mine. Everything was done with sledgehammers. Assembly line — what assembly line: three or four cars would clank along in chains, and by the time they reached the ground they'd already been stripped. But in a special corner stood two cars set aside for "the right people." One was chosen for me. A banquet followed. We drank heavily, and in the morning they bundled me into the car, telling me it was the finest thing they had. Blearily opening my eyes, I asked: "And which way is it to Leningrad?" They waved vaguely: "Go that way!" I drove and drove, dozing off and waking up… Near Moscow a traffic cop pulled me over: "I can smell something!" I couldn't think of anything wittier than asking him to give me a lift. He laughed: "All right, Misha, drive yourself!" I made it through the night to a friend's place near the Bolshoi Theatre. Slept a couple of hours, and at five in the morning we headed off down the empty highway toward Piter. Having wound the Volga up to about eighty kilometres an hour, I decided to test the brakes. The car suddenly fishtailed and we ended up in a ditch… About twenty minutes later a KamAZ truck pulled up. Pulled us out, and the driver laughed heartily: "How on earth did you manage that — there's not another soul on the road!" In Leningrad, the brand-new Volga died on the spot by Tekhnologicheskaya station — and not even because we'd banged it up, but because the factory's calculations had been for about five hundred to a thousand kilometres, after which a major overhaul was due. That Volga brought nothing but grief afterwards. And the next one — a white one — was the same story. My memories of the Volga are that it was like a motorboat — it chugged along just the same. But spare parts were never a problem. Whatever broke down, I could drive to any motor depot and for a bottle of vodka everything got fixed! The taxi drivers helped out too: "What do you need, Mishka? Here, I'll take the part off mine!" — never mind that "theirs" was state socialist property! I remember once, when I was performing at the Oktyabrsky Hall, some fan, expressing her ardent devotion in front of everyone, put a brick through the windscreen of my Volga. By the time I'd got changed and finished signing autographs, the policemen — wanting to do me a favour — had nipped to the depot next door, fitted a new screen, and returned the car to me in one piece… |
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Interesting Facts
- The prototype for the GAZ-24 project — the 1959 Ford — won the prize for best design at the international exhibition in Brussels, the same exhibition at which the GAZ-21 made its international debut.