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Re: A Trabant owner rebuilds his entire drivetrain....

Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2019 8:23 am
by Strelnikov
The End wrote:What amazes me is reading about Trabants, Wartburgs, Nivas, and other Soviet/Eastern European cars finding their way into Western Europe, Britain, and even Canada. You'd think the Cold War would mean the West would never allow Communist products into their markets considering that Western products would never be allowed in Communist countries, at least not for the non-elite.


If you had "hard currency" (i.e. American dollars) you could buy Western stuff from the "Beryozka" ("little Birch tree") store in the USSR. Other Warsaw Pact states had stores like that, (I think.)

Ladas were sold in Great Britain and Canada, Wartburgs in the US, but the number of dealerships were small. Lots of used Soviet cars found their way into Finland, and really some vehicles never made it, like the 4x4 UAZ van, and some of the larger military/industrial trucks. The Cold War meant nothing when it came to trade of certain items.

Re: A Trabant owner rebuilds his entire drivetrain....

Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2019 8:36 am
by Graaf Statler
Yes, I remember. With hard currency you could buy there anything and in for instance Prague you could change on every corner money. You had to change 30 mark a day, and the rest you changed black. The only strange problem was you couldn't spent it because there was simple nothing to buy.

But in this way people got hard currency. And in general where cars of a much poorer quality then today and the cars of the east where cheap and extreem simple to repair. And, some people drove them to show there political preference in that time. There was by some groups in the society a very romantic illusion of the communistic system in that time.