The research for this article was made possible by support from the College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University. Earlier versions were presented at the Center for Russian and European Studies at Michigan State University, 31 October 2003; at the 35th national convention of the AAASS in Toronto, 23 November 2003; and at the Russian History Workshop at the University of Chicago, 20 April 2004.1 am grateful to the participants in these forums for their comments and suggestions, and to Marcie Cowley for research assistance.

1. Osinskii, N., “Amerikanskii avtomobil'ili rossiiskaia telega?” Pravda, 20, 21, 22 July 1927 Google Scholar. For biographical information see Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 3rd ed., 30 vols. (Moscow, 1970-78), 18:558. Osinskii's enthusiasm for the automobile may have come from his trip to the United States in 1925-26 about which he wrote an account for the general public. See Osinskii, N., Po tu storonu okeana: Iz amerikanskikh vpechatlenii i nabliudenii (Moscow, 1926)Google Scholar. He noted inter alia that “it is characteristic of America that cars are used much more often than they are needed,” and that “Americans are so rich that they want to drive only huge four-wheeled vehicles” (61-62).

2. Osinskii, N., Amerikanskii avtomobil’ Hi rossiiskaia telega (Moscow, 1927)Google Scholar. One of Avtodor's first activities was to sponsor two “disputy” about the kind of mass-produced vehicle suitable for Soviet roads (or the absence thereof). The stenographic reports of the debates can be found in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow (GARF), f. 4426 (Society for Cooperation in the Development of Automobiles, Roads, and Transportation [Avtodor]), op. 1, d. 59,11. 1-94 (28 November 1927); d. 317,11. 4-51 (23January 1928).

3. For the negotiations and the contract's contents see Nevins, Allan and Hill, Frank E., Ford:Expansion and Challenge, 1915-1933 (New York, 1957)Google Scholar, appendix 1; Sutton, Antony C., Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, vol. 1, 1917 to 1930 (Stanford, 1968), 243–49Google Scholar; and Schultz, Kurt S., “Building the ‘Soviet Detroit’: The Construction of the Nizhnii- Novgorod Automobile Factory, 1927-1932,” Slavic Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 200–202 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the statement by the Ford Motor Company in “Kompaniia Forda ob Avtomobilizatsii SSSR,” Za rukm, no. 3 (1928): 3-4.

4. Osinskii, N., “Dve tysiachi kilometrov na avtomobile,” Za rulem, no. 15 (1929): 12 Google Scholar.

5. McCannon, John, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932-1939 (Oxord, 1998), 68 Google Scholar. See also Widdis, Emma, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, 2003), 128–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Brooks, Jeffrey, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000), xvi–xvii, 74–78 Google Scholar. Another analogy would be the Physical Culture Day parades described by Robert Edelman as “not a sporting event” but rather “a theatrically orchestrated political event.” See his Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the U.S.S.R. (New York, 1993), 41.

7. The path metaphor lying at “the heart of the governing ideology of the Soviet Union” is stressed by Lars Lih, “The Soviet Union and the Road to Communism,” in Suny, Ronald G., ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, forthcoming)Google Scholar. Lih cites Nikolai Bukharin, Put’ k sotsializmu i raboche-krest'ianskii soiuz (Moscow, 1925), as a key text. For an example of Osinskii's use of the path metaphor (at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927) see Carr, E. H. and Davies, R. W., Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929 (Harmondsworth, England, 1969), 1:45–46 Google Scholar.

8. On the discursive construction of the Soviet landscape, see Bassin, Mark, “Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 1–17 Google Scholar; James van (sic) Geldern, “The Centre and the Periphery: Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s,” in White, Stephen, ed., New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, 1992), 62–80 Google Scholar; Widdis, Visions of a New Land; and Dobrenko, Evgeny and Naiman, Eric, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle, 2003)Google Scholar.

9. For a capsule history of automobile rallies in tsarist Russia, including diree “large“ rallies in 1911, see Borisov, F., “Avtomobil'nyi sport v staroi Rossii i SSSR,” Za rulem, no. 9 (1928): 6–9 Google Scholar.

10. Harp, Stephen L., Marketing Michelin: Advertising & Cultural Identity in Twentieth- Century France (Baltimore, 2001), 17–19 Google Scholar.

11. See Sachs, Wolfgang, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of our Desires (Berkeley, 1992), 112–15Google Scholar; Frostick, Michael, AHistory of the Monte Carlo Rally (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Cowbourne, Donald, British Rally Drivers: Their Cars & Awards, 1925-1939 (Otley, 1996)Google Scholar.

12. Personal communication (2 January 2003) from Anton Borisenko, a St. Petersburg- based rally driver who runs a web site called “Rally & Russia” (http://www.rally.spb.ru/, last consulted 20 January 2005) and writes for an online magazine “Avtosport.ru“ (http://www.avtosport.ru/, last consulted 20 January 2005). GARF, f. 9552, op. 5, d. 1 (Protocols and reports of judicial collegia for international competition in automobile and motorcycle sport, 18 May-26 October 1958), 11. 60-65. Kurdzikauskas, A. and Shugurov, L., Avtomobil'nyi sport v SSSR: Spravochnik (Vilnius, 1976), 23, 40–42 Google Scholar. See also Dmitrievskii, A., “Sovetskie sportsmeny v mezhdunarodnykh avtomobil'nykh ralli,” in Avtomobilist-liubitel’ (Moscow, 1963), 74–77 Google Scholar.

13. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 1884, op. 5, ed. kh. 104 (Rules and conditions of participation of cars in the All-Russian Automobile Rally), ed. kh. 93,11.103,117; Pravda, 16 September 1923, 3; 26 September 1923, 6. Plans were developed for a konkurs (competition) of automobiles to take place in August 1923 through the Transcaucasian Federated Soviet Republic, but I have no information confirming its occurrence. See RGAE, f. 1884, op. 5, ed. kh. 92 (Protocols of the competition committee).

14. Dupouy, A., LAutomobik en URSS: Chronologie de 1917 à 1990 (Grenoble, 1991), 21 Google Scholar, citing Avtomobil'nyi spravochnik (Leningrad, 1924). This put Soviet Russia in sixteenth place in number of vehicles among all nations, just behind Switzerland and ahead of Norway.

15. Shugurov, L. M., Avtomobili Rossii i SSSR, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1993), 1:50 Google Scholar. Shugurov cites a figure of “not more than ten percent” for the number of Russian-made cars in 1914.

16. Dupouy, , L'Automobile en URSS, 19–20 Google Scholar; Shugurov, L. M. and Shirshov, V. P., Avtomobili strany sovetov (Moscow, 1983), 22–23 Google Scholar; Pravda, 10 October 1922; L. Shugurov, “K 50- letiiu sovetskogo avtomobilestroeniia,” Za rulem, no. 5 (1974): 36; Shugurov, , “Pervyi sovetskii,“ Za rulem, no. 11 (1973), 6–7 Google Scholar. The car was presented to Mikhail Kalinin who described it as the “first breach in the technological backwardness of the country.“

17. Pravda, 26 August 1925.

18. Coverage by Pravda's correspondent, A. Perovskii, was daily. See also Chudakov, E., “Avtomobil'nyi probeg i avtomobil'noe delo v Respublike,” Motor, no. 12 (1925): 229-33Google Scholar; Shprink, B. E., “Rezul'taty Vsesoiuznogo avtoprobega 1925 g.,” Motor, nos. 13-14 (1925): 254-60Google Scholar; nos. 17-18 (1925): 312-20.

19. Pravda, 22 August 1925; 30 August 1925; 1 September 1925.

20. Pravda, 23 August 1925. Accidents happened. On 27 August, Werle, the German driver of a Benz, succumbed to food poisoning and died in a Rostov-on-Don hospital after having consumed ice cream “on the road” in Artemovsk. Two Russian drivers also took ill but recovered. Two days later it was reported that an American motorcycle driver had been struck by an apple thrown by a peasant girl (interpreted by the reporter as a sign of “greeting“) on the road from Orel to Tula. His eye-glasses were broken and he suffered “light injuries” to his eyes. See Pravda, 28 August 1925; 30 August 1925.

21. Enukidze claimed otherwise, but in light of the extensive coverage of the competitiveness, penalty points, and prizes, his assertion rings hollow. Cf. Motor, no. 2 (1925): 46; Pravda, 22 August 1925; and Pravda, 29 August 1925.

22. Osinskii, , “Dve tysiachi kilometrov na avtomobile,” 17 Google Scholar.

23. I thank Diane Koenker for suggesting this connection.

24. I have taken this term from Widdis, , Visions of a New Land, 124 Google Scholar.

25. Osinskii, , “Dve tysiachi kilometrov na avtomobile,” 13, 15Google Scholar.

26. Ibid., 15.

27. Ibid., 17. Cf. his earlier “grandiose” slogan: “to seat each worker and peasant in a car within a period of not more than ten to fifteen years.” Pravda, 21 July 1927.

28. Hirsch, Francine, “Getting to Know ‘The Peoples of die USSR': Ethnographic Exhibits as Soviet Virtual Tourism, 1923-1934,” Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 683–709 Google Scholar.

29. Widdis, , Visions of a New Land, 111 Google Scholar.

30. Ibid., 106-7.

31. In fact, the heroism of the drivers was at least in some sense dependent on the arduousness of the journey. As detailed below, this implicit contradiction in the two moving metaphors was resolved in the case of the Kara-Kum rally by exempting Central Asia from the evolutionary stages through which the rest of the Soviet Union had to pass.

32. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 328,11. 1-14 (Report on the Viatka provincial rally, June - July 1929).

33. Za rulem, no. 9 (1929): 32. For a brief overview of road building and maintenance during the 1920s and 1930s, see Pavlova, T. K, ed., Dorogi Rossii: Istoricheskii aspekt (Moscow, 1996), 71–99 Google Scholar.

34. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 5 (Stenographic report of session of 16 May 1930), 11. 73ob., 79. See also “Na ukhabakh dorozhnoi povinnosti,” Za rulem, no. 12 (1930): 15; Sheikovskii, , “Chto meshaet uspekhu dorozhnoi povinnosti,” Za rulem, no. 17-18 (1930): 26 Google Scholar.

35. Izvestiia, 25 April 1932, 3. According to this report, the total number of labor days “given” to this task in the RSFSR in 1931 was 25.366 million. If, as indicated in another source, some 19 million people were eligible for such service, that would mean an average of 1.33 labor days.

36. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 5 (Stenographic report of session of 21 April 1930), 1. 55; Izvestiia, 22 June 1931, 1.

37. I am referring to Stalin's, letter “Dizzy with Success,” published in Pravda, 1 March 1930 Google Scholar.

38. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 342 (Report of member of the organization commission, Engineer N. M. Zaborovskii, 19 May 1930), 11. 14-15; GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 5 (Protocols of the central council's presidium, 1930), 1. 90.

39. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 342 (Protocols of the session of 9 October 1930), 11. 4 0 - 43. Cf. the article in Rabochaia gazeta, 16 August 1930, which referred to committees having been organized along the route to assist in the supply of fuel and oil, medical assistance, repair bases, etc.

40. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 342,11. 44-47, 52.

41. Such proposals came before Avtodor's central council in 1933, 1934, and 1935. For discussion of the proposals see GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 363, 1. 3; d. 23,11. 82ob., 105; and d. 405,11. 14-71.

42. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 5 (Stenographic report of 22 June 1930 on the realization of the Moscow-Vladivostok rally), 1. 90. Lezhava (1870-1937), an ethnic Georgian, served from 1924 to 1930 as chairman of the RSFSR Gosplan and assistant chairman of the RSFSR Sovnarkom. In what undoubtedly was a demotion, he thereafter was chairman of the Soiuzryba trust and until 1937 head of the Main Administration for Subtropical Cultivation. See Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia 14:266.

43. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 342,11. 7, 40. Shpanov evidendy was accustomed to more heroic and successful fare, having written about the rescue of the dirigible Italia by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin. See Shpanov, N. N., Podvigvo I'dakh (Moscow, 1930)Google Scholar.

44. Rabochaia gazeta, 12 June 1931.

45. Il'f, Il'ia and Petrov, Evgenii, Dvenadtsat'stul'ev; Zolotoi telenok (Kiev, 1957), 376-78Google Scholar.

46. Ibid., 378-82. The slogan on the banner attached to the Antelope-Gnu survives in popular memory, having been cited spontaneously by several Russians whom I informed about my research.

47. Ibid., 384-86.

48. The game is up only when the chairman of the welcoming committee in Luchansk (“Ray“; also perhaps a play on Lugansk) receives a telegram informing him of the imposters’ real identities. They barely manage to flee, and, while hiding in the grass along the Griazhsk (“mud“) highway, observe the cars in the real auto rally whizzing past “in a blaze of light.” There is a cryptic reference in the protocols of the central council of Avtodor's 9 April 1933 meeting to a request for cooperation on a “screen version of Il'f and Petrov.” GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 14, 1. 61. Incidentally, Lauren-Dietrichs did race in prerevolutionary Russian road races such as the 1907 Moscow to Petersburg race.

49. Koenker, Diane P., “Travel to Work, Travel to Play: On Russian Tourism, Travel, and Leisure,” Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 659, 663Google Scholar.

50. See especially Frye, Northrop, “The Nature of Satire,” University of Toronto Quarterly 14 (1944-45): 75–89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bloom, Edward and Bloom, Lillian, Satire's Persuasive Voice (Ithaca, 1979), 19 (“The affirmative impulse … is the seal of satire at its best.“)Google Scholar; and Bogel, Fredric V, The Difference Satire Makes (Ithaca, 2001), 32, 62Google Scholar.

51. For a recent social historical analysis of the con men of the Stalin era, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “The World of Ostap Bender: Soviet Confidence Men in the Stalin Period,“ Slavic Review 61, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 535–57Google Scholar.

52. In 1936 Il'f and Petrov would undertake a cross-country automobile trip of their own through the United States, their account of which was published in English as Little Golden America (New York, 1937).

53. Lezhava, A. M., “Avtoprobeg v Kara-Rum, stimul dlia uluchsheniia dorog,” Za rata, no. 13 (1933): 3.Google Scholar

54. Chuvashiia's Avtodor won the All-Union Road Contest in 1931. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 10,11. 78-78ob. See also d. 499,1. 197; and Kresin, K., “Pobeda sovetskikh mashin (itogi Kara-kumskogo probega),” Doroga i avtomobil', no. 3 (1934): 45 Google Scholar.

55. Pravda, 23 July 1933, 4.

56. Ustrinenko, I., “Paralleli,” Za rulem, no. 20 (1933): 13 Google Scholar; El-Registan, and Brontman, L., Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva (Moscow, 1934), 26 Google Scholar. See also “Sovkino zhurnal,” no. 23 (1933); State Archive of Cinema and Photographic Documents, Krasnogorsk (GAKFD), 0-2436. The newsreel, shot as the rally passed through the Chuvash republic, contained titles such as “Thousands of kilometers without bumps“; “Everywhere new bridges“; and “You won't spill the milk!” the latter preceding a clip of a peasant woman carrying a pail in a truck. Pride in their roads and the praise received from the rally's participants lives on in post-Soviet Chuvashiia. See Dorogi Chuvashii: Ot bezdorozh'ia do sovremennykh avtodorog; dokumenty i materialy, vospominaniia i stat'i, fotografii o dorozhnom stroitel'stve v Chuvashii (1920- 1997) (Cheboksary, 1998), 5, 99-100.

57. Pravda, 13 July 1933, 4; 23 July 1934, 4.

58. Za rulem, no. 11 (1929): 16; Chetverikov, N., “Probeg Ashkhabad-sernyi zavod 'Kara-Kum,’ 7-13 marta 1930 goda,” Doroga i avtomobil', no. 8–9 (1930): 38–39 Google Scholar; GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 340 (Report of the Kara-Kum car rally named after the 16th party congress, 1930), 11. 2-6.

59. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 340,11. 6-53. The author of this report boasted that “now we can look back and say that we performed a very difficult and very risky feat. Even the participants in the ail-Union rally of 1925 did not experience such difficulties and dangers as we did” (1. 24).

60. Kaiurov, A., “Ot Pamira do Moskvy,” Za rulem, no. 1 (1933): 16–20 Google Scholar; GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 351 (Data on participants in the Pamir-Mosccw auto rally and expedition, Sokolov, 28 December 1932), 11. 3-3ob.

61. Roman Karmen (1906-1978) was awarded a Lenin Prize in 1961 for his documentary films on the Spanish Civil War, the Great Patriotic War, and the Nuremburg trials. In 1954 he published his “notes of a cameraman,” of which the first part was devoted to the Moscow-Kara-Kum rally. See his Avtomobil’ peresekaet pustyniu: Zapiski kinooperatora (Moscow, 1954). Newsreel footage of the rally shot by Karmen and Tisse can be viewed in GAKFD in Krasnogorsk.

62. Brontman later served as Pravda's correspondent for the North Pole expedition of 1937-38. He also wrote a book about the most famous flight by an all-female crew aboard the “Rodina.” For details, see Petrone, Karen, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrad Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, 2000), 66–67, 74, 80Google Scholar. El-Registan (born Gabriel A. Ureklian in 1899, died in 1945), began his journalistic career in 1924 in Tiflis. The author of numerous children's adventure stories, plays, movie scripts, and travelogues, he co-authored with S. Mikhalkov the words to “Gimn SSSR,” the Soviet national anthem.

63. El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva; El-Registan and Brontman, Na zemkplemeni iomudov (Moscow, 1934)Google Scholar.

64. GARF f. 4426, op. 1, d. 374 (Plan for organizing the finish line of the Moscow - Kara-Kum-Moscow car rally, 1933), 11. 2-10.

65. Pravda, 1 October 1933, 1. See also the Boris Efimov cartoon entitled “Bolshevik Roll-Call” in Pravda, 2 October 1933, 4.

66. For the application of this observation to film see Widdis, , Visions of a New Land, 164-83Google Scholar; and to mass culture in general, van (sic) Geldern, “The Centre and the Periphery.“

67. USSR in Construction, no. 2 (1934). Pravda's variation on this motif was to situate Moscow at the top of the page, with an arrow snaking down the right-hand side, three photographs of the Kara-Kum portion at the bottom, and then another arrow zigzagging up the left-hand side back to Moscow. 1 October 1933, 3.

68. Hirsch, , “Getting to Know,” 683, 687Google Scholar.

69. The issue of USSR in Construction that includes coverage of the Kara-Kum rally (no. 2, 1934) opens with a page quoting Stalin's aphorism, ‘'There are no fortresses which the Bolsheviks cannot capture.” The diary includes an appendix consisting of the technical commission's report on the condition of each of the twenty-three vehicles in the “Kara- Kum column.” El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 219-22Google Scholar.

70. El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 40, 94, 105, 167Google Scholar; Pravda, 30 August 1933, 4.

71. El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 73 Google Scholar. Described as a “simple and disciplined hereditary proletarian,” Miretskii “never for a minute doubted the success“ of the rally and “always spoke in a calm voice.” In contrast to the rally in which Osinskii participated, the majority of drivers were professionals.

72. Ibid., 105.

73. Ibid., 155-58; Pravda, 29 August 1933, 4

74. El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 88–90, 117-21Google Scholar. Tsinzerling, author of a 1924 study of irrigation in the Amu-Daria basin, inspired in Roman Karmen recollections of “stories of fearless Russian explorers, courageous travelers discovering new lands … [and] subjugators of merciless Asiatic deserts.” See Karmen, , Avtomobil' peresekaet pustyniu, 10–11 Google Scholar. A recent study of the environmental damage in the Aral Sea basin cites Tsinzerling's “scenarios of impacts based on increased amounts of water diversions“ as “mimicked … by the decades of events that followed.” Modernizing with a vengeance! See Glantz, Michael H., “Sustainable Development and Creeping Environmental Problems in the Aral Sea Region,” in Glantz, Michael H., ed., Creeping Environmental Problems and Sustainable Development in the Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge, 1999), 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75. El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 200–218 Google Scholar.

76. Here I am in agreement with Slezkine, Yuri, “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Socialism,” Russian Review 59, no. 2 (April 2000): 227-31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77. Cf. Miretskii's version of the nomadic Kazakh's response: “You are deceiving me. Your work is a great work. And on Soviet land there is no such work in which comrade Stalin himself does not take part.” USSR in Construction, no. 2 (1934): back page; and Bronfman's encounter with a Young Pioneer in the Georgian mountains who, having read in Pionerskaia pravda about the engineer Levin, inventor of the super-balloon tires used by the vehicles in the desert, asked to meet him. Pravda, 7 September 1933, 4.

78. El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 40 Google Scholar. Captain Mayne Reid (1818-1883) was one of the most prolific and widely read authors of juvenile adventure novels, most of which were set in the American West. He himself was born and raised in northern Ireland. El-Registan would imitate Reid in such children's books as Sledopyty dalekogo severa (Moscow, 1937).

79. El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 81–88, 114-16Google Scholar. The earlier legends figure prominently in El-Registan and Brontman, Na zemle plemeni iomudov.

80. El-Registan, and Brontman, , Na zemle plemeni iomudov, 42 Google Scholar. Pointing to the money, Sultan-Murad is quoted as saying “I wouldn't exchange it [the attestation] for half a/rad of such paper.“

81. The reference to twenty-five million cattle comes from Iaroslavskii's, E. speech at the rally's start as reported by El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 20 Google Scholar. One is reminded of the fusion and confusion of time in Chingiz Aitmatov's novel, I dol'she veka dlitsia den’ (1981).

82. Pavlenko and Eizenshtein collaborated on the script of a film, Fergana Canal, that began production in 1939 but was abandoned after several months, apparently owing to cost overruns. Pavlenko, who had been sent to Turkmenistan as part of a writers’ brigade in 1930, used Central Asia as the backdrop for several works of fiction including his last, unfinished novel, Toilers of Peace. For more details, see my “Constructions of Construction: The Great Fergana Canal, 1939” (paper, AAASS Convention, St. Louis, Mo., November 1999).

83. The phrase is Slezkine's, Yuri. See his “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 440 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 373, 11. 23-32 (Report of Grustlivov to chairman of the committee Kuibyshev, 26 August 1933).

85. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 372,11. 46-49 (Letter from S. Utkin to “Moiseilonovich“). On Utkin see El-Registan, , “Solov'i ne poiut,” Izvestiia, 30 September 1933, 3 Google Scholar; and El-Registan, and Brontman, , Moskva-Kara-Kum-Moskva, 97–98 Google Scholar.

86. GARF, f. 4426, op. 1, d. 13 (Protocols of session of 27 November 1933), 11. 101-104ob.

87. For Potemkinism see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford, 1994), 262-68Google Scholar.

88. See for example Peris, Daniel, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, 1998)Google Scholar; Getty, J. Arch, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades; Douglas Northrop, “Nationalizing Backwardness: Gender, Empire, and Uzbek Identity,” in Suny, Ronald Grigor and Martin, Terry, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford, 2001), 191–220 Google Scholar; Payne, Matthew J., Stalin's Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh, 2001)Google Scholar.

90. See Koshar, Rudy, German Travel Cultures (Oxford, 2000), 117-25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Overy, R.J., “Cars, Roads, and Economic Recovery in Germany, 1932-8,” The Economic History Review 28, no. 3 (1975): 466-83Google Scholar; Ruth Brandon, Automobile: How the Car Changed Life (London, 2002), 196-236. On “autopia,” see Wollen, Peter and Kerr, Joe, eds., Autopia: Cars and Culture (London, 2002)Google Scholar.

91. See Pravda, 3 August 1937, 6, for the announcement of a 20,000-kilometer highspeed rally that, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the October revolution, would traverse all eleven union republics. The rally received no subsequent coverage in the press and probably never happened.

92. The diesel rally was a genuinely international competition with entries from fifteen foreign companies. According to the organizational committee's president, Sorokin, it was “not for sensational or recreational purposes.” See Pravda, 25 July, 1934, 6; and D'iakonov, Sergei, “Istoriia odnogo motora, k 70-letiiu mezhdunarodnogo dizel'nogo konkursa,” Avtomobili i tseny, no. 38 (2004): 18–21 Google Scholar. On the latter two rallies, see Za rulem, no. 18 (1938): 11-17; Pravda, 4 July 1939, 6.

93. Pravda, 31 July 1936, 6; 30 July 1936, 4. See also Za rulem, no. 17 (1936): 10.

94. Pravda, 30 September 1936, 6; Izvestiia, 9 September 1936, 4; Trud, 30 September 1936, 3; 1 October 1936, 1 (editorial); Volkova, A. P., Zhenshchina za rulem, zapiski komandora 1-go zhenskogo avtoprobega imeni Stalinskoi konstitutsii (Moscow, 1937)Google Scholar. On Angelina, see Pasha Angelina, O samom glavnom (Moscow, 1948); on the “Rodina,” see Brontman, L. and Khvat, L., Geroicheskii perelet “Rodiny” (Moscow, 1938)Google Scholar.

95. Cheremovskii, I., “Sportivnyi avtoprobeg,” Za rulem, no. 19 (1936): 24.Google Scholar

96. Zarulem, no. 5 (1937): 5, 6-7; no. 6 (1937): 3; no. 7 (1937): 2-3; no. 13 (1937): 8-11; no. 15 (1937): 9; no. 16 (1937): 11; no. 17 (1937): 17; no. 18 (1938): 11-17; no. 19- 20 (1938): 25; Pravda, ljuly 1938, 6.

97. DorogiRossii, 91-99; Pravda, 24 August 1938.