In the late 1980s, the communist governments of the Eastern Bloc recognized their countries’ potential for car manufacturing and ownership and sought to replace their terrible old smokers with modern metal.
“We have decided to increase our automobile production from 1.3 million in 1987 to 2.5 million in 1995,” said Valentin Morozov, the first deputy minister of the automobile industry in the USSR – the bloc’s dominant power and by far its largest Automobile manufacturers of the Soviet Union Poland (303,000), East Germany (210,000), Czechoslovakia (188,000), Yugoslavia (171,000) and Romania (120,000).
In 1989, Fiat became the first Western car manufacturer to enter into a joint venture with the USSR and planned to build 300,000 units each of the new 1125 compact hatchback and the new 1111 subcompact car annually.
This was all part of the USSR’s plan to convert Elabuga (on the Volga, but 370 miles east of the GAZ site, which produced Volga-badged cars) into a Russian Turin, thus creating the new EIAZ brand. The city was to be massively expanded and its population increased from 70,000 to 300,000 to support this major redevelopment of the old KamTZ tractor factory.
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Behind the Iron Curtain, Fiat was uniquely trusted because it sold production licenses there in the 1960s, which resulted in the FSO 125p in Poland, the Zastava 125pz in Yugoslavia and the VAZ Zhiguli in the USSR (exported as the Lada 1200). Therefore, it was brought in to help develop the VAZ 1111 (or Lada Oka abroad), which went into production in Tolyatti in 1988, and then an improved version, the EIAZ 1121 “Kama”.
Amazingly, Porsche agreed to develop an engine for it after previously working with the USSR – a tiny four-stroke twin with 35 horsepower.
Meanwhile, the 1125 was constructed without major Fiat transmission parts and designed with the help of Italdesign in Turin. VAZ rejected Fiat’s innovative new 1.1-litre fire engine in favor of its own 56bhp 1.0-litre unit – and also rejected Giorgetto Giugiaro’s design in favor of the USSR’s Central Automotive Research Laboratory’s limp, oddly named debut proposal, NAMI, off.
For us, NAMI would have been better off using its 1988 compact design. At least Italdesign’s work was not in vain and in 1993 it was transformed into the Fiat Punto. In fact, neither the 1121 nor the 1125 ever materialized, as the Elabuga EIAZ hub was never built after the unexpected collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Capitalism spread across the former Soviet republics and completely transformed societies and economies. When Elabuga actually got a car factory in 1995, it was run by General Motors. American!
However, some cars from this period of planned modernization and growth did see the light of day.