Named for the Russian river, the Volga was the most successful car ever produced by the former Soviet Union. Unlike the high-end Chaika, which was reserved for government officials and Communist party functionaries, the Volga was a car for the masses. At least, it was for those masses lucky enough to get a car at all. From 1956 to 1970, 638,875 Volga M21/M22 automobiles left assembly lines. While that's a fair number for home-brewed Soviet cars, it's only about 70% of the number of F-Series pickups Ford sold just last year.
The story of the Volga begins in the early 1950s, as the Cold War was getting fairly hot. In the fall of 1953, as Joseph McCarthy hunted Communists in the U.S. Army, Alexander Mihajlovich Nevzorov was making the first drawings of the Volga. Josef Stalin was dead and his successors, Nikita Khrushchev and Georgi Malenkov were eager to move the Soviet Union forward. Nevzorov was given carte blanche to develop a car that would rival those produced by the United States.
As GAZ ("Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod" or Gorky Automobile Plant) was founded in 1929 as a joint venture between Ford and the Soviet Union, it's perhaps not surprising that some of stylist Lew Eremeev's early designs bore a strong resemblance to the then-current Ford sedans.
The first working prototype of the new Volga was completed in 1954. Its four-cylinder, four-stroke engine featured a chain-driven overhead camshaft and hemispherical combustion chambers. This engine could not be production-ready by the time the car was scheduled to be introduced, so an enlarged version of the side-valve engine from the M20 Pobieda was used.
The Volga was associated with some of the best and worst aspects of Soviet life. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was a proud Volga owner and visited the GAZ works in 1963. The black Volga sedan was also the standard ride for agents of the notorious KGB.
The M21 Volga made its press debut in 1955. While the Soviet government proudly pointed to the fact the Volga had gone from concept to drivable car in just two years, the reality was the Volga was nowhere near ready to be mass-produced. In fact, in 1956, the first official year of production, only five cars were built, with the first coming off the line on October tenth. It was not until 1957 that any average Soviet citizen who had 5400 rubles could sign up to buy a Volga.
The 1957 Volga was quite different from the car shown to the press in 1955. The biggest change was an entirely new 2.5-liter 4-cylinder OHV engine, the first engine to be produced at the ZMZ engine factory. While it was intended to rival American cars, the Volga was much smaller, being just four meters (a bit over thirteen feet) long. However, with seating for six adults, it was large for a European car and was the biggest Soviet passenger car ever produced for mass sale.
There were three distinct variants of the M21 Volga. The Series 1, built from 1956 to 1958, borrowed a number of American styling cues, mostly from Ford and Studebaker. The grille treatment was quite similar to the 1953 Ford Custom, except that the central "bullet" in the Ford grille was replaced by a Soviet star.
The Series 2, produced until 1962, featured a new grille with vertical bars. Based on customer preference (and pocketbook), the grille could either be painted to match the body color or chromed.
The final version was introduced in 1962. This was the model produced in the largest numbers and is also the basis of the Herpa model. Another new grille, with smaller vertical bars, new taillights and a more sharply-defined body treatment are the spotting features of the Series 3. In addition, the leaping deer hood ornament found on Volgas built for the home market finally disappeared. Volgas built for export never had the deer because of safety concerns.
The M21 was not the only Volga. There was also the M22, a station wagon version, built from 1962 to 1970 and the M23, a limited-production version with the V8 engine from the GAZ Chaika, power steering and automatic transmission. Though it was also in production from 1962 to 1970, only 603 M23s were built, all for the Soviet KGB. While the KGB didn't like the M23 because of its poor handling, it was quite fond of the Volga itself and the black sedans (like the Herpa model) became closely associated with the dreaded secret police.
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