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Cars from the former Soviet Union have rarely found critical acclaim in Western Europe. Unfashionably styled and crudely made, they have usually been technically a generation or more behind their European rivals; many were either cribbed from out-of-date western designs or built under licence once the West no longer wanted the tooling. Those that made it over here had their heyday in the late '70s when the three-day week, shortages, strikes and power-cuts brought us our very own slice of dour Iron Curtain life. In our fashion-conscious culture, however, owners ran the gauntlet of social ridicule as brand names such as Skoda, Moskvich and Wartburg became by-words for all that was naff, un-cool and utterly downmarket - especially in the status-obsessed '80s.
Yet for many people, these cars made sense as cheap, rugged, no-frills transport. Well specified and strongly built - to survive in a land with less hospitable roads than ours and no service network - these models were supplied at bargain-basement prices by Russian, Czech and East German governments hungry for foreign currency. And for many British buyers, they represented a one-and-only chance of owning a brand-new car. You won't see many of our 10 on British roads today (although, amazingly, many of the companies mentioned are still building the same cars for their home markets) but those that do survive have an austere, alternative chic that makes them strangely compelling.
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