After the main assembly line of AZLK was halted in March 2002, it seemed that the Moskvich brand had irrevocably sunk into oblivion. Fortunately, this did not happen (almost), and this year the brand will celebrate its 80th anniversary. What better reason to recall interesting events from the history of the Moscow automobile plant and the cars that made AZLK famous not only in the USSR, but also abroad?
Since the perestroika era, a significant portion of our citizens firmly believe that the USSR hardly developed its own cars, and mostly stole everything from the West. Starting with the government ZISs, Pobeda and Volga, and of course, the first mass-produced Soviet car – the Moskvich-400.
It must be admitted that such claims have some basis: the ZIS-101 and ZIS-110 were indeed products of reverse engineering of American cars, but to claim that the entire Soviet automotive industry was "pirated" is, to put it mildly, foolish. It is enough to recall the purchase of licenses for the Ford-A and AA, which began production in Nizhny Novgorod in the early thirties, or the licensed Fiat-124, which became the Soviet Zhiguli.
And the Opel Kadett K38, also known as the Moskvich-400, is not a stolen model either. When production of this car began at the Moscow ZMA in December 1946, not a single Western country even hinted that the Soviets had stolen it. However, a very significant number of our citizens believed and will continue to believe that the first Moskvich was a stolen Opel Kadett.
So how did it really happen?
As is known, theft is a criminal offense; accordingly, there is a criminal and a victim. It is clear that the role of the criminal is by default assigned to the USSR, but who then was the victim? It seems Germany claims this role, as it supposedly owned the "robbed" company Adam Opel. True, upon closer examination, it turns out that in the second half of 1945, a country like Germany did not exist; there was only the territory of former Germany, divided into four occupation zones between the USSR, the USA, England, and France. Moreover, the German company Adam Opel also did not exist. Or rather, the name existed, but it was the name of the German branch of the American concern General Motors. As for the Opel plant in Rüsselsheim, after the bombings by Allied aircraft, only ruins remained. It is also worth recalling that Opel returned under the wing of the parent concern GM in the summer of 1945, and before that, from 1941 to 1945, it was nationalized by the Third Reich after the USA and Germany found themselves at war. So it was not the USSR that stole something from Opel, but Hitler's Germany that "squeezed" this enterprise from its legal owner – General Motors – in 1941. Therefore, when the Soviet Union decided to produce the Opel Kadett K38 in Moscow, the Soviet side negotiated not with the Germans, who had no say in Germany since mid-1945, but with the Americans. Because the Opel plant in Rüsselsheim was located in the American occupation zone, and all rights to the Opel Kadett K38 belonged to General Motors. And here's the interesting part: the Americans did not object at all to the Soviet side taking the surviving equipment and drawings of the Opel Kadett from Rüsselsheim, and even taking German engineers along with them.
And all this happened thanks to agreements between the USA and the USSR. In July 1945, in Potsdam, the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition held a conference where the post-war structure of Germany was discussed, and the victors simultaneously determined their shares of reparations. After lengthy negotiations, they agreed that the USSR had the right to take 10% of the industrial equipment available in the American, British, and French occupation zones. The Opel plant in Rüsselsheim, or rather what was left of it, fell into that 10%. So the USSR did not steal the Opel Kadett K38, as some think, but received it absolutely legally, within the framework of interstate agreements. Moreover, it received it from the legal owner – the General Motors concern.
By the mid-forties, the Opel Kadett K38, which went on the assembly line in November 1936, had become an obsolete car in every sense. It is worth noting that it was the same age as the Soviet GAZ M-1, whose production ceased in 1942 and was replaced by the developed M-20 Pobeda.
However, the post-war USSR needed an inexpensive and mass-produced car, and in that capacity, the Moskvich-400 proved to be very fitting. Especially since Soviet engineers had their eyes on the Opel Kadett K38 even before the war – just look at the predecessor of the Moskvich-400, the pre-war KIM-10-52. The serial production of the latter was prevented by the outbreak of war, and after the war, access was gained to both the drawings and part of the production line of the plant in Rüsselsheim, so the decision was made to "naturalize" the Opel Kadett.
In fact, there were no other options to quickly establish mass production of a car, even though a significant portion of the documentation and tooling had to be made from scratch. There was another reason that forced the USSR to put a far from new and not the most modern car on the assembly line. The Soviet government knew perfectly well what price the people had paid for victory in the war, so why not give the victorious people what they clearly deserved? A simple, reliable, and relatively inexpensive car. Of course, not everyone could afford to pay 8,000 rubles for a Moskvich-400, but the GAZ M-20 was generally accessible only to a few, as it cost 16,000 rubles.
It is also worth recalling how the name "Moskvich" came about. The name for the new car was invented by Oleg Dybov, the deputy chief designer of ZMA. In 1947, Moscow was to celebrate its 800th anniversary, so Dybov proposed naming the car Moskvich. The higher-ups did not object to such a name, and for 80 years now, the Moscow automobile plant, although it has changed its own name several times, continues to produce cars under the name "Moskvich".
Relatively few naturalized Opel Kadett K38s – first-generation Moskvichs – were produced from 1946 to 1954, only 216,000 units. However, the engineers and designers of the Moscow automobile plant gained invaluable experience in organizing mass production of cars and creating various modifications. But most importantly, the Moskvich-400 became the first Soviet car to appear in free sale, and anyone who wanted could buy it.
In the history of every enterprise, there is its own golden era, as well as everything that usually follows it. After mastering the production of the second generation of Moskvichs, models 402, 403, 407, 423, in 1959, the designers of MZMA began developing the Moskvich-408 model, which went on the assembly line in 1964 and, in the form of subsequent modifications (412 and 2140), was produced until 1987. This was the most successful and mass-produced model of the Moscow plant, but at the same time, at a certain stage, it became the stone that dragged the enterprise to the bottom.
In the early sixties, the Moskvich-408 was a very decent car with a successful design authored by Boris Ivanov, with passive safety well-developed by the standards of those years, and good export performance. It became the first MZMA model to be registered in Izhevsk, and its modification, the Moskvich-412, was produced under license in Bulgaria.
In addition to the sedan and station wagon bodies, the Moskvich-408 could also be equipped with a convertible body. Moreover, no less a person than the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, N.S. Khrushchev, wished to see such a modification. Having visited France in 1960, Nikita Sergeevich was charmed by the "Caravelles". Not the ships, but the Sud Aviation Caravelle passenger liner and the Renault Caravelle convertible, which the General Secretary received as a gift from the President of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle. Khrushchev handed the car over to MZMA with a wish to make something similar for Soviet citizens, and by 1964, the plant had built two Moskvich-408 Tourist convertibles. The wheelbase remained exactly the same as the sedan and station wagon – 2400 mm – but the car was converted into a two-door and equipped with a fabric top and a removable hard roof. However, in 1964, Khrushchev was sent into retirement, and the issue of the convertible was closed. Soviet motorists would hardly have understood such a curiosity, although in European countries, the demand for a convertible might have been good. However, MZMA did not have spare resources for producing a niche model with unclear prospects, so the Moskvich-408 Tourist remained built in only two copies.
In 1968, MZMA changed its name to AZLK, and a year earlier, production of the Moskvich-412 model began, which was produced at the Izhevsk plant until 1997, simultaneously acquiring a modification with a liftback body (Izh-2125 Kombi). Thus, the Moskvich-408 and its descendants were produced with sedan, station wagon, liftback, pickup, and van (Izh-2715) bodies. The latter was discontinued only in 2001, which means that the family, whose progenitor was the Moskvich-408, remained on the assembly line for 37 years.
On the one hand, one can praise the car for such enviable longevity, but it was produced for so long not because of outstanding characteristics, but because nothing else could replace it for many years, both in Moscow and Izhevsk. Although the Moskvich-412 needed a replacement back in the mid-seventies, instead, in 1976, production of yet another modernized version began – the Moskvich-2140.
A successor in the form of the Moskvich-2141 appeared only in 1986, that is, at least five years later than the deadline that would have allowed AZLK to be considered a manufacturer of modern and competitive cars. And while the Moskvich-2141 did manage to get on the assembly line, the engine shop for producing the engines specially designed for it was never completed. This clearly did not benefit the car.
Looking at the rather modest achievements of the Moscow automobile plant, which over 55 years managed to master the production of cars of only four generations, one might think that the plant workers worked half-heartedly for long decades, stamping out the same model for years. Of course, this is not true. The designers of MZMA-AZLK were literally brimming with ideas and developed many interesting cars, and one of them became truly popular. However, it was called the ZAZ-965 Zaporozhets, not the Moskvich-444, as it was named at its birth in 1957. The car developed in Moscow was transferred to Zaporozhye by a top-down decision, thus deciding to develop the automotive industry of the Ukrainian SSR.
In the same year, a prototype of the Moskvich-A9 minibus was presented, but this car did not go into production. A year later, MZMA began testing several prototypes of the Moskvich-415 off-road vehicle, which by 1960 had transformed into the Moskvich-416. These off-road vehicles also did not go into production due to MZMA's limited production capabilities. The Moskvich-2150 off-road vehicle, presented in 1973, also did not go into production – the VAZ-2121 was deemed more promising, and it's hard to disagree with that.
In 1970, AZLK began developing a successor to the Moskvich-412, named the Moskvich 3-5-2, but work on the car dragged on for five years, it did not go into production, and preference was given to the Moskvich-2140. Then the same fate befell the Moskvich-S1 and Moskvich-S3 hatchbacks, meaning that for almost ten years, AZLK designers worked in vain. And yet the seventies were precisely the years when the foundations for the plant's further development could have been laid, but instead, officials from the Ministry of the Automotive Industry decided to focus on the French Simca-1307. But even with that, they had to tinker for nearly ten years before the Moskvich-2141 went on the assembly line.
AZLK designers managed to develop several more interesting cars: the Moskvich-3733 and Moskvich-2139 Arbat minivans, the Moskvich-2143 Yauza and Moskvich-2144 Istra concept cars, but these were, in essence, stillborn projects. In the conditions of a collapsing country, AZLK could not bring any of them to the assembly line on its own, continuing in the nineties and early 2000s to squeeze everything possible out of the morally obsolete "forty-first".
What happened next is well known. The comatose state of the plant, the arrival of Renault, then the rapid flight of the French in 2022, and the start of assembling JAC models under the revived name "Moskvich". It is unlikely that this was how the future of the Moscow automobile plant was imagined in the early post-Soviet years, but, as they say, we have what we have. At any rate, Moskvich cars are still being produced in Moscow, and this, you will agree, is better than if the Moscow automobile plant had repeated the fate of ZiL, SeAZ, or TagAZ.
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