Tag Archives: Yugoslavia

Industry of Machinery & Tractors

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Before Yugoslavia dissolved into seven separate countries (we’re counting Kosovo – live with it Serbia), it was a communist dictatorship like so much of Eastern Europe. And with the usual foibles of Communism, that meant magnificently unimaginative naming.

Cue the Industry of Machinery & Tractors (IMT) 533, a 33hp tractor licensed from Massey-Ferguson and built in large numbers from the 1950s and for decades thereafter.

This neat Lego example comes from Flickr’s Keko007, and pulls an equally neat wooden drop-side drawbar trailer. There’s more of the model to see at Keko’s ‘IMT 533’ album and you can head to the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia via the link.

Room 101

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Lego Zastava 101

We quite like Fiat here at TLCB. They make the 500 and also own Ferrari, which has got to put them pretty high up on anyone’s cool car company list.

Unfortunately for every good thing Fiat have done there’s something else from their back-catalogue to cancel it out. This is one such event, the truly awful Zastava 101 (named, we think, after the room from the George Orwell masterpiece ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’*).

As with most Soviet Bloc monstrosities from the Cold War era, the Zastava was based on an old Fiat (see also Lada, FSO, Yugo etc.) and was built with all the care and attention of a kamikaze pilot checking his landing gear. We can be fairly sure then that this wonderfully detailed Lego example by Chapachuk took far more skill and love to create than the real car. See more of the miniature plastic version on Eurobricks or Flickr.

*”You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.” (George Orwell)