Collectors around the world are well aware of the USSR’s 1:43 scale metal cars. These are high-quality and coveted models for many collectors. Legend has it that the director of the Soviet automobile manufacturer, the Moskvich 412, saw a Corgi model of the Soviet car while on a business trip abroad and decided to produce a series of similar toys in the USSR. He succeeded, and things took off. Unfortunately, Perestroika in the USSR also ruined this great undertaking.
The history of smaller scale metal cars is quite different. Today, it can be said with certainty that only a few models were ever produced. In the late 1970s, the Zhiguli 2101 model, affectionately known as the “Kopeyka,” was developed and put into production at the Minsk plant. It was the very first model produced by the Volga Automobile Plant in Tolyatti. It wasn’t exactly a good model—it was more of a toy—but it was a real breakthrough. The first 3-inch scale metal die-cast toy car appeared in the USSR. The model’s underbody indicated a 1:60 scale. The model’s price was 2 rubles 50 kopecks, and this figure was also printed on the metal underbody. This wasn’t exactly cheap; for example, a loaf of quality bread cost 18 kopecks, while lunch in the factory cafeteria cost 50 kopecks.
For the 1980 Olympics, a series of VAZ-2101s were produced in a plastic box with the 1980 Olympics logo. Today, they are more valuable than even earlier versions of this model.

VAZ produced cars for the domestic market under the name “Zhiguli,” while these same cars were exported under the name “LADA.” The box for the Minsk model indicated “VAZ 2101,” which would later be labeled “LADA&.”

The car was produced in several colors, the most common being light green with a red interior, which is what I had. Blue, gray-beige, and burgundy were also slightly less common. The underbody was metal, sometimes painted silver, sometimes unpainted. The underbody was held in place with rivets. All the cars had plastic wheels on thin metal axles.
A little later, the Progress Plant released the AMC Parcer, a low-quality remake of a similar model from the English Corgi. The Stratos also entered production at the same time.

In Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, the Gorky Automobile Plant GAZ-24 model was produced. Many models had a metallic paint job, which, of course, set them apart from all other models in small and other scales. Another unique feature of the Volka was that part of the rear window was connected to the headlights, so if you closed and opened the rear window with your finger, the headlights would alternately light up and then go out. Today, something similar is found on the Hot Wheels Corvette.

The Tula Cartridge Plant produced a series of military vehicles, including the GAZ-63, popularly known as the “gazik” or “kozel,” which was also close to the 1:64 scale we’re interested in.

That’s the whole list.

Now you understand why a Matchbox car was much more important to a Soviet boy than to an English or American boy.

Many born in the 1960s and 1970s would only see their first 1:64 scale toy cars in the 1990s, when a flood of foreign toys flooded the Russian market, and these weren’t high-quality Matchbox or Hot Wheels models.

Needless to say, a boy in the USSR couldn’t go to a toy store with his parents and buy a race track. My classmate and I made our first track out of the scraped-up plastic railings in the entryway of a neighboring building. His father played in the Bolshoi Theater orchestra and often toured with that great theater abroad. That’s why he had multicolored Matchbox cars, which made a huge impression on us, his friends, back then. They simply raced around our gray track. Hitting anything was out of the question. At the end of the track, there was a soft cushion where the cars landed at the end of their runs.

to be continued …