Trucks of the Soviet Union: the definitive history

When the Communists raised the red flag over Russia in October 1917, they inherited a country with virtually no truck industry. By the time of the Soviet Union’s demise at the end of 1991, its engineers, designers and workers had created one of the world’s largest truck industries.

Politics and revolutionary expediency were never far from the design studio, or the shop floor, making this a story as much about a nation as it is about an industry.

Soviet truckers were faced with driving huge distances across a landscape that included some of the coldest and hottest places on earth, a country that spanned Europe and Asia, the Arctic Circle and the Caucasus region. Service stations and motorways were few and far between in such a huge country, making reliability and serviceability far more important than driver comfort.

Trucks of the Soviet Union (ISBN 978-0-9928769-5-1) by Andy Thompson is available now from Behemoth Publishing.

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