"Little Tsars of the Road": Soviet Truck Drivers and Auto-Mobility, 1920s–80s

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to insert “auto-mobility,” a concept denoting the principal socio-technical institutions and practices that seek to organize, accelerate and shape the spatial movements and impact of automobiles, into our understanding of the experience of human movement in Russia particularly during the decades when trucks outnumbered cars, and secondly to bring the Soviet experience to bear on scholarly conversations about auto-mobility. It does so by considering truckers from the perspective of labor history and to get at the broader cultural significance associated with truck driving, partly in terms of the highly gendered images of truckers in both political and popular imagination.

The paper begins with the “legend of Kol’ka and Raika,” a song that entered into the repertoire of truckers during the 1930s and has been periodically revised ever since.  The legend comprises one of the threads that connect truck drivers to the fabric of Soviet history and exemplifies one of their enduring images. The remainder of the paper consists of an examination of the four types of truckers in both official and popular imagination. These are: heroes, professionals, loners, and wheeler-dealers. Sometimes presented as ideal types and sometimes merely as an allusion, these different versions of truckers  - derived from sources as varied as the folkloric, magazines, newspapers, films, photography, and middlebrow literature - often appeared simultaneously. Their chronologies in any case overlapped and thus are presented in fairly arbitrary order.