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Sunday, December 26, 2021

Molotov Mobile

New Hyperion

Drive Tribe has the story:
It was 1932 when the Soviet Union, thanks to a commercial agreement with the Ford Motor Company, built its first mass-produced passenger car. Called GAZ-A, it was derived from the 1931 Ford Model A and was built up to 1936 in several thousand specimens. In 1933 the Soviet leadership wanted, however, the realization of the most technologically advanced car and it was decided to build it based on the new Ford Model B.

After three years of experimentation, the new GAZ-M1, whose name derives from Vyacheslav Molotov, notorious Soviet foreign minister, was finally presented at the 1937 Paris Expo. The car was built until 1943 in more than 62,000 units and today represents one of the icons associated with the great patriotic war. In 2019 a customer applied to the Truck Garage tuner in Saint Petersburg to transform the wreck of an M1 into a modern off-road vehicle and after a year the new Hyperion was presented this week.
The notorious Vyacheslav Molotov? Yah, notorious is the word. Some bits from Wikipedia:
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890 –  1986) was a Russian politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik, and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s onward. 

During the 1930s, he ranked second in the Soviet leadership, after Joseph Stalin, whom he supported loyally for over 30 years, and whose reputation he continued to defend after Stalin's death, having himself been deeply implicated in the worst atrocities of the Stalin years.

The improvised incendiary weapon known as the Molotov cocktail is named after him.

Well, of course the cocktail is named after him. I mean it must be, I've never heard of anyone else named Molotov. How it got that name tells us a little more about the man (from another Wikipedia story): 

The name "Molotov cocktail" was coined by the Finns during the Winter War, called Molotovin koktaili in Finnish. The name was a pejorative reference to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who was one of the architects of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed in late August 1939.

The name's origin came from the propaganda Molotov produced during the Winter War, mainly his declaration on Soviet state radio that bombing missions over Finland were actually airborne humanitarian food deliveries for their starving neighbours. As a result, the Finns sarcastically dubbed the Soviet cluster bombs "Molotov bread baskets" in reference to Molotov's propaganda broadcasts. When the hand-held bottle firebomb was developed to attack and destroy Soviet tanks, the Finns called it the "Molotov cocktail", as "a drink to go with his food parcels".

So the Finns used bottles of gasoline to toast the arrival of the Soviet tanks.


2 comments:

xoxoxoBruce said...

That is so cool !!

Justin_O_Guy said...

I clicked on the link. Dave Tribe has more pictures, too.
Cool stuff, had No idea about Molotov.