This article analyzes the landmark deal between the Italian automobile corporation Fiat and the Soviet government to build and operate the Volga Automobile Factory (VAZ). Drawing on formerly closed corporate records and declassified Soviet documents, the article traces how the Cold War helped shape the strategy of a West European multinational corporation in its attempts to manipulate the national and international political context in which it was acting. In Fiat's strategy toward the uncertain Soviet market, car production represented more of a bridgehead than an ultimate objective. Fiat's Ostpolitik was carefully planned and coordinated with the U.S. government and with other large Italian businesses. Italian-Soviet cooperation in building VAZ, the symbol of material well-being and peaceful industrial reconstruction, facilitated the requests of Soviet officials and Western corporations to lift East-West trade restrictions on non-strategic goods, thus conferring political legitimacy on trade with the Soviet Union.
The paper introduces the special issue ‘East–West cooperation in the automotive industry: Enterprises, mobility, production’ which includes four contributions on the development of socialist automotive industry and on the technological relations between Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War. The 1960s and 1970s intense relations between socialist governments and Western European automobile companies provide further evidence of the permeability of the Iron Curtain, the early entanglements between the two blocs and the lack of internal cohesion inside each of them. The papers stress the role of the enterprise, both socialist and capitalist, as a crucial agent in directing East–West flows of technology and knowledge. They invite to reconsider the classical vision of West–East transfer of technology and to go deeper in the study of the political uses of foreign technology and on the processes of reception, adaptation and transformation of Western technologies in Socialist Europe.
From 1945 to 1989, the Automobilové závody, n.p. (Automotive Plant, a national enterprise), in Mladá Boleslav, manufactured one of the best-known brands of motor car in the Eastern Bloc, the Škoda. This article focuses on the process of planning and manufacturing a change in models in the Czechoslovak automotive industry between 1968 and 1990. It is widely known how the launch of a new model of car represents a key step for every car manufacturer in most parts of the globe. In Czechoslovakia under Communist rule, however, passing from one model to another entailed grotesque, almost insuperable, difficulties, and it can therefore be seen as a textbook example of the complications of the innovation process in a centrally planned economy. The article draws not only on documentation available in company archives but also on the records of the Czechoslovak secret police, the State Security services.
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