Packard Forum Index » ZIS, ZIL, and other Packard Cousins!

Some might call it sugarcoating but to understand old cars as chain link and introduce them as part of our technocultural history, to charge a car with emotions and bear in remembrance the pioneering achievements to testify to former greatness of its constructors of old, to use its today softly gleaming body as projection surface to take the car and with that its viewers back to old great, means to encompass it with a great firm dome of philosophy:

A car is more than the sum of its parts!

Pipe dreams often dilute these efforts and therefore we have to periodically open a window to let bad air out. Today I will focus on sensation-seeking stories ? la "I smuggled a car out of Russia", "I drove the smuggled car", "first Soviet car in USA/Britain/western hemisphere", ...
From the beginning Kalashnikov's and vodka spook through such kind of reports. To smuggle a car one need at least a car and an export or import restriction but you have to be one of the most clueless car experts to believe that the US market ever had required an import restriction for Soviet cars or the Soviet economy ever imposed a related export restriction.
Soviet cars were available to foreign markets and drove on foreign roads even in prewar times.



[picture source: NBI; Oct. 1940]

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Moscow Bolshoi Theatre, founded 1776.





Moscow Radio Tower, hyperbolic steel gridshell, 160-metre-high free-standing, built in 1919 - 1922.



Quote:
Written 2011 on PackardInfo.com



sources:
pic 1: www.allday.ru
pic 2: wikipedia

When speaking about legends and diffused light then I should mention Hollywood. A certain proportion of our superficial knowledge derives its origin from Warner Bros., Universal and other motion picture studios.
To trace a KGB-Chaika to its source I want you to take a look at the screenplay of Firefox, a spy thriller featuring Clint Eastwood as an intrepid bulwark of occidentally freedom. To capture a MIG-31, a fully computerized stealth fighter, he alone has to vanquish the entire Red Army - business as usual for Clint.



The movie, filmed in 1982, looked a bit ahead. Thoughts with which the anti-aircraft missiles can be precisely controlled have to be thought Russian - well, Chuck Norris won American Idol using only sign language.
But what's the problem with the Chaika? Look, taking BigKev's calculation method of 5% car attrition as a basis then not more than 2,046 Chaika's existed worldwide in 1982 and if the KGB would have to choose a vehicle to watch Dirty Harry furtively on his way in the middle of nowhere to the air base of Bilyarsk then they wouldn'd use a Chaika, known for 23 years as distinctive Soviet government car.

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What was the white Tschaika 'Moby Dick' used for? If not painted white it would look like a flower car.
Thank you in anticipation!

M. G.

Yes, it is a flower car. As to the white color, that could depend on regional prevailing religions and their ceremonies. Chaika funeral vehicles have been converted from former official cars after sorted out.
Here's a black one.

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Let's have a look in the white whale's stomach. The coffin insertion aperture (red market) is open to the top and due to the flatbed plenty of stowage space remained underneath.
I took the photos in Estonia, located at the Gulf of Finland in the back of beyond.




Welcome in fairyland! [source: welt.de]

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I don't want to ruin Gerds post, but the presented GAZ 13 is officially for sale:http://www.kuldnebors.ee/search/soidukid/uunikumid/gaz-13-catafalck/search.mec?pob_post_id=7586580&pob_action=show_post&pob_cat_id=10698&pob_browser_offset=0&pob_view_language_id=et

I don't know what to say,maybe I should not say anything. For me it is more confusing the hundreds of for sale advertisements of old cars.

?13.000 sounds more than fair, a good Tshaika costs at least ?25.000 and often more than ?30.000.

http://suchen.mobile.de/fahrzeuge/showDetails.html?id=150452056&__lp=1&scopeId=C&sortOption.sortBy=price.consumerGrossEuro&makeModelVariant1.modelDescription=Tschaika&negativeFeatures=EXPORT&lang=de&pageNumber=1

To evaluate the asking price it could be helpful to know that the offered car is driven by a weak-minded 120 hp truck engine (GAZ-53), which is optical similar and therefore source for one or another bitter disappointment. Avoid!

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New Im a little bit disappointed, the original engine has been replaced with the ZMZ-53 engine.But that engine is hardly capable of any high RPM(unless modified before).
The alternator and Power steering pump,seem to be still original.
But since ZMZ 13 engine is in Estonia extremely rare, then its no wonder they turned to the closest alternative. Worst case would have been a inline 6 or 4.