In the late 1980s, the Eastern bloc’s communist governments realised their countries’ potential for car making and owning and strove to supersede their terrible old smokers with modern metal. “We’ve decided to increase our car production from 1.3m in 1987 to 2.5m by 1995,” said Valentin Morozov, the car industry’s first deputy minister in the USSR – the bloc’s domineering power and by far its biggest car maker, ahead of Poland , East Germany , Czechoslovakia , Yugoslavia and Romania .
As it happened, neither the 1121 nor the 1125 ever materialised, as the Elabuga EIAZ hub was never built, following the unexpected collapse of the USSR in 1991. Capitalism tore through the former Soviet republics, changing societies and economies entirely, and so when Elabuga did get a car factory in 1995, it was one run by General Motors. Americans! Some cars from this period of planned modernisation and growth did see daylight, though.