Things Car Guys Need: Cars of the Soviet Union

Normally we don't endorse products, but we normally don't come across something this — pardon our surfer tongue — bitchin': Haynes Publishing (they of the service manuals) has released a book titled "Cars of the Soviet Union". The book charts the history of Iron Curtain wonder cars from 1917 until 1990, when the USSR wound down like the poorly-assembled clockwork playthings that their undersized children were so fond of. It is, in the words of Haynes, "the story of an insular, state-run car industry in which the carefully thought-out ideas of ministerial planners, rather than fickle customers in a free market, determined what cars were made in a country where the open road was often a 300-mile track across a windswept steppe."

Go check out some samples here and here, then order the book from Haynes' UK store.