Tag Archives: Soviet

Forever 21

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This splendid creation – pictured in front of some equally splendid wallpaper – is a GAZ-21 Volga, a Soviet large sedan produced from the mid-’50s until 1970.

The most luxurious car available to individual owners within the USSR, the GAZ-21 was styled to resemble ’50s American cars, and even featured a Ford-licensed column-change gearbox, despite the rather frosty relations between the two countries at the time.

Constructed by previous bloggee paave, this Technic recreation of the GAZ-21 remarkably features that column-change gearbox, along with a working 4-cylinder engine, independent front and leaf-spring rear suspension, steering, folding seats, plus opening doors, hood, trunk, and glovebox.

A full parts list and building instructions are available, and you can take a closer look at paave’s brilliant creation via both the Eurobricks forum and his Bricksafe gallery.

Beige Box

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Russian exports have taken a bit of a hit since the country decided to invade its neighbour. However Russian products used to be exported to rather more countries than you might expect, including TLCB’s home nation. This was one such item, the Fiat-derived Lada Riva.

Launched in the UK in 1983, up to 30,000 Rivas were sold annually by the late ’80s, to customers looking for the cheapest new car available, and of whom 80%’s favourite colour seemed to be beige.

The Riva continued in the UK virtually unchanged for over a decade, before Lada finally withdrew from the market in 1997 as newer Hyundai, Kia, and Proton products outcompeted the Niva at the cheapest end of the new car market.

Today there are very few Nivas left on our roads, but not because they’re unreliable. Rather, the UK’s high maintenance standards and low used car prices meant thousands were re-exported back to Russia, where they were seen as better examples than domestic units.

This one, in the pre-requisite beige, is the work of previous bloggee Legostalgie, who has captured the soviet three-box sedan brilliantly in brick form. There are four opening doors, a detailed interior, a life-like engine under the opening hood, plus an opening trunk, and you can build one for yourself too as instructions are available.

There’s more to see at Legostalgie’s ‘Lada Riva / VAZ-2107’ album on Flickr, and you can jump to Britain in 1988, or Russia anytime since then, via the text above.

Route 66

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The war in Ukraine drags on, as tiny-penised Putin continues his folly to return the region back to the days of the Soviet Union.

Those days, marked with oppression, fear, and the eradication of freedom of movement, religion and speech, also included some fine engineering. Most of this was of course of the nuclear-weapon or space-race type, but the Soviet Union created some excellent off-road vehicles too. This is one of them, the GAZ-66.

Produced from the mid-’60s until ’99 – and still in use today in a variety of despotic authoritarian regimes including North Korea, Iran, and Syria – the GAZ-66 was a 4×4 military truck available in a bewildering array of configurations.

This one is a ‘K66V’, fitted with a box body behind the cab. Built by Samuel Nerpas (aka Tatrovak), this brilliantly engineered Technic version is remotely controlled via a BuWizz bluetooth battery powering four drive motors, servo steering, and two sets of LED lights.

Planetary hubs, all-wheel-suspension, and all-wheel-drive ensure Samuel’s GAZ-66 is suitably capable off-road, and the model also includes a tilting cab, opening doors, and a removable superstructure.

There’s more to see at both the Eurobricks forum and via Samuel’s Flickr photostream, where you can find all the imagery, build details, and videos of the model in action.

Concordeski

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This is a Tupolev Tu-144D, and if looks like Concorde, that’s because it kind of was. Only much, much worse.

Rushed into the skies to beat Concorde to supersonic air-travel (which – by a few months – it did), the Tupolev Tu-144D flew just 102 commercial flights between the sixteen aircraft built, of which only 55 – for just seven months in 1977-78 – carried actual passengers. Which means that half of all the total Tu-144D flights only flew cargo. Supersonic cargo. Yay communism.

By 1983 the Tu-144D programme was halted completely, due to the aircraft’s unreliability, crashes and development issues (although weirdly NASA used the Tu-144D for supersonic testing up to 1999), and the aircraft were put on display around the Soviet Union, where they remain today.

This one however, is on display on SvenJ.‘s desk, having been beautifully constructed in brick form. Ingenious building techniques, detailed landing gear, and an accurate ‘Aeroflot’ livery make Sven’s Tupolev Tu-144D a wonderfully realistic replica of the Soviet supersonic airliner, and there’s more of the model to see on Flickr.

Click the link above to buy your supersonic ticket. Or perhaps just take a look, and then fly Concorde instead…

Foxbat

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It’s 1970, and the Cold War is approaching its coldest. The U.S have taken images of an unknown Soviet fighter plane, and they’re terrified.

It’s massive, with huge wings, and looks highly manoeuvrable. The aircraft is the MiG-25, a supersonic interceptor and reconnaissance plane, armed with-air-to-air missiles, powerful radar, able to climb to the edge of space, and still to this day one of the fastest aircraft ever created.

This phenomenal Model Team recreation of the fighter that defined the Cold War is the work of previous bloggee [Maks] of Flickr, who has recreated the MiG-25P ‘Foxbat’ in stunning detail. Working landing gear, four air-to-air missiles, and accurate markings all feature, and you can pretend you’re U.S intelligence worriedly studying grainy images c1970 via the link in the text above.

Urally Good

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We may mock President Putin as regularly as we can create a tenuous link to his dickwittery, but the country he dictates is an amazing one. Spanning from the Atlantic to the Pacific across eleven time zones, responsible for the first animal, satellite, and person in space, and with a history uniting fifteen separate countries into one bloc of… er, communist misery, Russia and the former Soviet Union are a major part of our current world.

They also make probably the best off-road trucks of anyone, which are needed to traverse a vast and wild landscape, with most having their roots in the Military. Founded in 1956, off-road truck-maker Ural shares this history, and still employs 4,000 people today building trucks like this, Vladimir Drozd‘s beautifully presented Ural crane truck.

With a working crane that rotates, elevates, extends, and winches, Vladimir’s Ural functions as good as it looks, and there’s loads more of his superb model to see at his ‘Ural Crane Truck’ album on Flickr. Take a look via the link above, or here for a tenuous link to Putin’s dickwittery.

Ural-4320 6×6 | Picture Special

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This magnificent model is a Ural-4320 6×6 truck, a Soviet-era general purpose military truck first built in 1977, and still in production today.

Powered by a naturally-aspirated V8 diesel or a V6 turbodiesel, the Ural-4320 is very slow, but able to carry a variety of loads, from troops to rocket launchers, over almost any terrain. Well, unless the Russian Army recruits behind the wheel abandon them and run.

Which is what has occurred in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with over six-hundred Ural-4320s destroyed or abandoned, and around fifty captured a repurposed by the Ukrainian military, according to Dutch open-source intelligence group Oryx. Which is marvellous.

This phenomenal fully remote controlled Model Team recreation of the Ural-4320 comes from Russian builder and previous bloggee Michael217, who has brilliantly captured not just the aesthetics of the real truck, but also much of the driveline too.

A LEGO Buggy motor powers all six wheels, each of which is suspended and fitted with a portal axle, there’s Servo steering (that turns the steering wheel too), a high/low gearbox, opening doors and hood, a detailed engine, and an open load area ready to be fitted with a variety of Russian (or Ukrainian…) equipment.

There’s much more of Michael’s amazing model to see at the Eurobricks discussion forum, you can find the full image gallery at Bricksafe here, and you can watch the truck in action via the video below.

YouTube Video

Clickety Click

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This splendid creation is a soviet-era GAZ 66 off-road truck, and it’s currently trundling around the office with a gaggle of TLCB Elves in the dropside-bed. Powered by a BuWizz 3.0 bluetooth battery, previous bloggee keymaker has squeezed in remote control steering, four-wheel-drive, a powered and locking winch, live-axle suspension, and a miniature V8 engine, all in model measuring just 30cm long.

A complete image gallery is available to view at Bricksafe, whilst full build details, a video of the model in action, and a link to building instructions can be found at the Eurobricks discussion forum via the link above too. Clickety click to take a peek!

*Fifty TLCB Points if you can figure out this post’s title.

Reheated Russian

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Poland and Russia are not exactly best mates right now (but then Russia only has three friends left and they’re all maniacal dictatorships).

However back in the 1960s Poland and Russia were rather closer, as – whilst Poland was never formally part of the Soviet Union – the influence of Russia’s Red Army taking control of Polish territory from Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War turned Poland into a communist satellite state.

It also led to the supply of (usually obsolete) Russian military hardware, including this; the MiG-17. Replaced by more modern supersonic aircraft in the Soviet Union, the MiG-17 was then produced under license in Poland, becoming the Lim-5 and Lim-6, and used all the way up to the 1990s.

This neat Lego replica of the rather funky-looking Cold War fighter is the work of [Maks], who – with the help of some strategic stickers – has created the Lim-6 ground-attack aircraft brilliantly.

There’s more to see at [Maks]’s ‘Lim-6bis’ album on Flickr, and you can fly back to 1960s Poland via the link in the text above.

Variable Geometry

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This is a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-23, a 1970s Soviet fighter and fighter-bomber, and the most-produced variable-geometry fighter in history. Over 5,000 MiG-23s were built, with hundreds sold around the world to various scumbaggy dictatorships, some of whom still fly the aircraft today. This excellent brick-built version comes from John C. Lamarck and it includes the MiG-23’s variable wing sweep, working landing gear, and a variety of exciting looking weaponry. There’s more of the model to see at John’s ‘MiG-23 MF’ album on Flickr and you can take a look at cutting-edge Cold War aeronautics via the link above.

Red Square

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Russia isn’t exactly a bastion of commercial opportunity at the moment. Unless you’re a citizen able to buy a departing western brand at a knock-down price. Back in the 1970s though, Russia – and the wider Soviet Union – was seen as a land of opportunity. If you were Fiat anyway.

A range of obsolete Italian designs were sold to the Soviet Union, with the most famous being this; the Lada 1600 / VAZ-2106. Like the 2103 that preceded it, the 2106 was based on the 1967 ‘European Car of the Year’ Fiat 124, although now updated with the deletion of the chrome brightwork (dull black plastic was far more appropriate at ensuring the population knew its place) and a larger engine of Lada’s own design

The 2106 was hugely successful, becoming VAZ’s most numerous product, and being built in several factories across the Soviet Union including in both Russia and Ukraine. Production finally ended in the early-’00s, after which Renault became a majority stakeholder in the company and Lada designs switched from Italian to French.

Which brings us back to Ukraine and knock-down prices, as last year Renault sold their majority stake in the Avtovaz / Lada company for just two roubles ($0.026) due to Russia’s ongoing war with its neighbour. It cost Renault around $2billion, and created the bargain of the century for a lucky Russian buyer.

That lucky buyer is of course the Russian State (aka Vladimir Putin), who has Lada back in Russian hands, and with $2billion of modern French technology thrown in too. Who’d have thought we’d be longing for a Lada built from bits of old Fiat in Cold War Soviet Ukraine, rather than a re-badged Renault stolen via a vicious illegal war.

We are though, so here’s Legostalgie‘s superb Lada 1600 / VAZ-2106, which is not only wonderfully realistic visually, it includes four opening doors, an opening trunk and hood, a beautifully detailed engine and a lifelike interior, all presented via top quality imagery.

There’s lots more of the model to see at Legostalgie’s ‘Lada 1600 / VAZ-2601’ Flickr album, and you can jump back to a time when Ladas were old Fiats rather than stolen Renaults via the link in the text above.

Old Lady’s Bathroom

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This is a Trabant 601, accurately resplendent in the colour of an old lady’s bathroom, and made from a similar material too. Created by László Torma in Speed Champions (ironically) scale, this neat miniaturisation of the rubbish East German people’s car captures the original wonderfully, and there’s more to see – including a ‘Combi’ station wagon version – at László’s photostream. Click the link above for more Hearing-Aid-Beige communist wonders.

And Now For Something Completely Different*

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That lump of rock orbiting 550,000 miles above us all has only been landed on by one nation, the USA. But what if the Soviet Union had made it there too? Well the two countries would have fought over it, obviously.

Cue Shannon Sproule’s ‘Battle for the Moon‘, a retro-futuristic lunar conflict in which wind-up mechanoids, barely one step above pots-and-pans-robots, ‘battle for the ultimate high ground’. There’s more to see on Flickr, and you can blast off to pick a side via the link above!

*Link. Naturally.

Communist’s Choice

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Communism wasn’t renowned for giving its citizens choice. However today we have no less than four communistical vehicles to choose from, each built by PelLego of Flickr as apart of a wider collaborative build.

From left to right are a Kamaz 55102, a nondescript green tractor, a GAZ 66 covered truck, and a (somewhat later) GAZ Tigr, and there’s more to see of each, plus the collaboration in which they appear, at Pel’s photostream via the link above.

And – because we haven’t been threatened in a while – here’s a bonus link to the last time a GAZ Tigr appeared on this site…

Off-Road Krazy

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We have a happy bunch of Elves today, thanks to keymaker and his incredible KrAZ 255 6×6 truck. Built for off-roading, keymaker’s creation is too slow for the Elves to use it to run one another over, but great fun to ride around in the back of.

Powered by LEGO’s new Control+ motors, all six wheels are driven and suspended, and include locking differentials too, via a switch in the cabin.

Interestingly, keymaker’s chassis uses two driveshafts front-to-rear, allowing a separate motor to power each side, with the two wheels on each axle linked together via a differential.

A remote control winch, locking trailer hitch, opening doors, storage boxes and bed sides, LED lights, and a working V8 engine add to the technical realism, whilst the exterior is enhanced by a variety of off-road modifications from the video game ‘Snowrunner’.

It’s a fantastically well-engineered creation and one that’s well worth a closer look. Do just that via the Eurobricks discussion forum where full build details are available, keymaker’s ‘KrAZ 255’ Bricksafe album, where there are over forty images and technical renders, or via the excellent video of the truck in action below.

YouTube Video