Across the history of the USSR and the Russian Federation, the cars used by public officials have always drawn wide attention. Efforts to curb or streamline the purchase of expensive foreign cars by the Soviet party elite and top officials began as early as 1923. The Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU instructed state institutions to buy only open-bodied vehicles and motorcycles with sidecars from abroad, acknowledging that such vehicles could be repurposed for military needs in wartime.
Yet the party leadership continued to use foreign cars even after the Soviet auto industry emerged. The armored Packard Twelve, acquired in the late 1930s, served Stalin and his associates in the late 1940s. Later, domestic armored ZIS-110S replaced it. The prewar ZIS-101, the first passenger model from the Stalin Moscow Automobile Plant, was not designed with bullet protection in mind.
Kuzkin mother showed
Meanwhile, the fleet of cars used as personal transport by leaders at various levels grew, and officials sometimes used these personal vehicles for family trips or private business. In the mid-1950s, Nikita Khrushchev pushed to curb civil service privileges, including reducing the number of private cars among officials.
A joint decision by the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers in March 1956 sharply limited the range of officials permitted to use personal cars. Surplus vehicles were handed to taxi companies or sold to citizens. In April 1960, Moscow saw a report of four thousand old personal cars being sold by Behind the Wheel magazine. Attempts to create a rental car system failed to gain traction. The drive to tighten transport privileges continued until Khrushchev’s removal in 1964, but bureaucrats pressed for alternatives: monetary compensation for officials lacking personal transport, numerous exceptions to rules, and contracts with taxi firms to provide permanent transport services for government bodies.
Even today, many state officials prefer not to own cars outright but to contract transport services through specialized companies.
As secretary general, Leonid Brezhnev did not shrink from the trend. Instead, the bureaucratic fleet under his time expanded, with officials receiving luxury cars as gifts from foreign heads of state and prominent businessmen. This period also influenced vehicle production at domestic plants. For example, the GAZ plant developed the GAZ-3102 in 1981, a model designed to be used within departmental garages, while the older GAZ-24 continued to operate in taxi services and remained available for citizens.
New methods, new thinking
The next state-level attempt to curb the appetite for official transport came in 1988 under Mikhail Gorbachev. The production of the GAZ-14 Chaika limousine was halted ahead of schedule, and all equipment and documentation for the limousine project were destroyed. The ZIL-4102 limousine project with a load-bearing body was likewise terminated, with only two published copies surviving to the present day.
After the USSR collapsed and large numbers of foreign cars entered the country, domestic vehicles gradually ceded space in state garages. In 1997, a move to shift officials from foreign cars to Volga models was proposed by Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and approved by President Boris Yeltsin. During the same period, Moscow officials purchased luxury Moskvich variants for city use, yet the plan did not spread widely because repair costs for domestic cars proved higher than servicing foreign models. The policy was abandoned a couple of years later.
Flashers as an advantage
Beyond expensive foreign cars, signal devices and special license plates became a visible symbol of transport privileges for officials. The Khrushchev era saw early efforts to curb such privileges. In 1957, an order restricted the movement of cars with flashing lights, extra lamps, sirens, and other signals that offered travel advantages in Moscow, except for vehicles on a formal list of high-ranking leaders. The number of cars with special signals in Moscow was about 150 at that time.
Concession numbers featuring the Russian flag instead of regional codes appeared in early 1996. An interior ministry order in 1997 prevented traffic police from stopping or inspecting these cars and directed them to assist in fast passage. The flag plates remained in use for more than a decade, until the end of 2006, when the exclusive serial A MP97 began to be used as a modern equivalent.
In the 1990s, the number of cars with flashing signals rose steadily, aided by government decrees that simplified their use. By 2006, Russia counted 965 such vehicles, excluding those in operation for security services. A presidential decree in 2012 reduced that tally to 569 vehicles.