Modeling Behind the Iron Curtain?

I recall in the 80's we used to get kits from a company called Novo in the UK. They were from the USSR but according to scalemates they are no longer in business, the last kit listed is 1980.

I was in my early days of models at the time, mainly doing old airfix, but the Novo kits didn't seem to bad at the time.

I only went there a couple of times, but I did buy a kit at a shop in Dessau. I wish I still had it- it was a civilian transport version of a Bear. I think it was some sort of box scale.

That would have been some serious cabin noise.

EDIT: I found the darn thing on the net! 1/100 scale Tu-114 made by VEB Plasticart in the DDR. Plasticart was around from the late '50s until the fall of the Wall.

Novo was a company that bought the old Frog molds, so for it's time they were pretty decent models.

GMorrison

EDIT: I found the darn thing on the net! 1/100 scale Tu-114 made by VEB Plasticart in the DDR. Plasticart was around from the late '50s until the fall of the Wall.

I built the VEB Plasticart 1/75-ish An-2 Colt recently, and it was a blast. Soft or non-existant detail, but a good basic shape to work with.

VEB was an interesting company. They started as a generic toy manufacturer, but when they shifted to kits, they did lots of airliners and military aircraft in scales from 1/100, 1/96, 1/75 and a few others. They also did some oddities (for that time and place) like Vostok spacecraft.

I remember a company called Ogonek(?) from Russia.  They had 1/30 armor kits, including an IS-3 or T-10.  I wanted it so bad, but the scale put me off.

I did get a VEB IL-62, and although simplistic, it looked the part.

This thread reminded me of a conversation I had with some Czech modelers. When I asked them why does so much of the aftermarket stuff come from Czechoslovakia and Poland, they laughed and told me that Eastern Bloc kits were terrible and stuff from the West was expensive and hard to get.  They had to make their own details to add to their sad Sov-Bloc kits, and thus were ideally positioned to provide the West with their creations when the Iron Curtain came down.

And now we have companies like Eduard, Zvezda, ICM and Miniart moving up the ranks of high quality kit manufacturers of the world.

Is good time to be modeler, yes?

Growing up in Yugoslavia, we were neither here nor there as far as the iron curtain goes. My dad or the family would be frequently travelling to the West and, among other things, buying kits. We could also occasionally buy kits in some local toy shops or supermarkets. I had mig 17 and 21 and Il-2 under Czechoslovakian name and Boeing 707, An 12 and 24, Mil 6 and that Soviet flying crane and the one similar to the Chinook with 2 rotors, can't remember the names.

I don't know how detailed they were and to a boy in early to mid teens that didn't really matter. What i did miss a lot were instructions on how to paint and weather them. My dad would now and then bring me modelling magazines with amazing models but my English wasn't good enough then to understand the technical terms. Also, we didn't have access to correct paint colours, brushes etc. I would paint the models using big oil cans we had in the garage trying to replicate what we saw in the movies.Those were fun times. I still have the box at home in Croatia with the old models. Most of them are broken and dammaged but next time we go, this coming summer, I might dig some out and bring them back to canada for "restauration" using the latest and greatest technology available

Hello!

I think I can give you some info here - I started modelling in Poland in 1986 - that gives me three years experience behind the iron curtain, plus some tales I have heard from my older friends.

As for the western kits - those were only available when somebody went abroad and bought them personally, or they were sometimes sent as gifts for those for those fortunate enough to have relatives abroad. The economic differences between us and the world made those kits very expensive - a western kit could cost you sums comparable to a monthly wage of a factory worker - that's how I have heard it. Consequently a model kit was equal for many people with tons of money, and that notion lived very long. Once in the late nineties I have put some empty boxes from the kits I have built in a cellar in our block - and somebody promptly burglarized that cellar hoping that the boxes are full...

Kits that were sometimes available in stores - and then you had to wait in a long line to get them - were manufactured locally. In Poland those were mainly "Plastyk Pruszkow" kits - Jak-1, Il-2, RWD-5, PZL-37 Los, LWS Czapla were most popular. Lucky paople could get their hands on Czech kits - Kovozavody Projestov = Kopro = KP. They had some MiGs, some Avias and Aeros, Jak-23, some helicopters - that was really a treat after building several Los... Then there were the East German VEB Plasticart kits - they  had some models that were just gigantic in comparison with "our" models, all those airliners in wild scales, they had a Be-6 flying boat, Soviet Bombers and stuff like that.

Castelnuovo - the helicopter you mean was the Jak-24. That was a funny rig!

And there were the soviet kits - copies of the Frog kits, those were had to be brought by people travelling to the Soviet Union, they weren't exported much, sold under different brands and often without box or decals, just packed in a plastic bag with very basic instructions. But the subjects could be very interesting - planes like DH Vampire or HS Buccaneer, and label "Frontline fighter" or "Fighter-Bomber" - and you were left to guess what it is. We wouldn't want to advertise for a capitalist, now would we, comrade?

But to get one of those plastic kits you would really have to save some nice amount of money and have many friends with connections to people who would go abroad - at least to the socialist countries. So many times a young modeller was left to "Maly Modelarz" paper models - or you could go to a local modelling club - there were many of them than - and they would help you carve something from wood, or build a flying or swimming model from scratch.

And then came 1989, the wall broke down and all hell was loose - you could buy almost everything, but you didn't have any money anymore... Those were the days!

Thanks for reading and have a nice day

Paweł

Thats really interesting pawel. What strikes me is that it seemed easier for us to get hold of Soviet kits like Frog and Novo than it was for you guys to get them, and they were not that expensive.

Hello Bish!

Thanks a lot - when you think about it, please consider how much wealthier the west was, compared to the socialist countries, that not only were devastated by the WWII, but were also using up a lot of their economic potential for the arms race, neglecting the wellbeing of the people in process. In the end of the eighties an average worker in Poland only earned several dollars a month after you recalculated it - how many western models can you buy for that? And buying dollars wasn't easy or legal in most cases, either.

So for everyone in the east, selling the kits west was just perfect business - not only did they get good money for it, but it also was western money, badly needed to buy stuff that couldn't be made east (like computer chips and stuf like that). That also meant that there were fewer kits left for us to build, because of the limited number produced many were sold west.

In turn for the people east everything from the west was very expensive and hard to get, so you needed a real freak to buy models, when there were so many things most people wanted to buy abroad first, like video and cassette recorders, cars and parts for them, and so on.

And imagine the real freak, who, for example, paid a lot of money for the Monogram Mi-24, and then cut it all apart to correct the dimensional errors of it... That's dedication! Such people were able to do amazing things when the freedom came at last!

Have a nice day

Paweł

Wasn't Maquette from somewhere in Eastern Europe, like Ukraine or someplace like that?

Don Stauffer

Wasn't Maquette from somewhere in Eastern Europe, like Ukraine or someplace like that?

 

 

Don, you and I both have the B 307, with a set of fuselage castings and the wings etc. from a B-17 kit.

I had a Maquette Vickers Viking kit. I bought it from a store that I was owned by a friend. Sort of a no-returns policy on it, but I got him to take it back. New fuselage, a bunch of Wellington parts.

I've learned a lot from this thread. The explanation about why resin AM became big in the East makes a lot of sense.

Pawel, if you ever see a 1/72 GAZ-66, I'll pay you back.

Castel and Pawel, I was really hoping that you guys would answer up on this. For some reason my thoughts the other nite took me back to that old SU-7 Fitter kit that I had bought, and the other Warsaw Pact type kits that were at that shop. Aside from a few general types of tanks and planes, there just was not that much available to us from “our manufacturers”. It was mostly stuff that was seen in the West due to the Arab Israeli wars, Korea, or to a lesser extent, Vietnam. Only the professionals with access to the information  knew the differences in types. 

Thanks to both of you for that look back view from behind the “curtain”. Yes CN, I do remember that Yugoslavia was non aligned and not part of the Pact. But being a socialist/communist country with many similar constraints, the conditions sound not too far removed. The cost and availability considerations make sense. 

gregbale

 

GMorrison

EDIT: I found the darn thing on the net! 1/100 scale Tu-114 made by VEB Plasticart in the DDR. Plasticart was around from the late '50s until the fall of the Wall. 

I built the VEB Plasticart 1/75-ish An-2 Colt recently, and it was a blast. Soft or non-existant detail, but a good basic shape to work with.

VEB was an interesting company. They started as a generic toy manufacturer, but when they shifted to kits, they did lots of airliners and military aircraft in scales from 1/100, 1/96, 1/75 and a few others. They also did some oddities (for that time and place) like Vostok spacecraft.

I presume that was the DDR equivelant of GmbH in the Bundesrepublik. Of course being a workers paradise, were not all industries state owned?

I spent about 2 weeks in the DDR in 1978.

Would you be able to go there then as a serving member of the US Army?

GMorrison

I spent about 2 weeks in the DDR in 1978.

Would you be able to go there then as a serving member of the US Army?

 

Three ways:

1, IIRC soldiers of the Berlin Brigade could at times, depending upon the detente situation of the hour, go on pass thru to the East into East Berlin, since it was right there;

2, there were officers assigned to monitor Warsaw Pact exercises and activities in uniform,  under international accords. I don't recall their official title anymore. The WP had a matching program. A US Army Officer was shot and killed by Soviet personnel during such activities at the time I was there;

3. SF and LRRP/LRS personnel were occasionally ”sheep dipped”, sent w/o military ID, uniform, etc. with whatever cover story, on information gathering tasks. 

"In Soviet Russia, you don't build model kit - model kit build YOU!!!"

Someone had to post that.  

stikpusher

I presume that was the DDR equivelant of GmbH in the Bundesrepublik. Of course being a workers paradise, were not all industries state owned? 

Akin, but not equivalent.

Akin, because it's a designation that describes the kind of company the business is, just as "GmbH" does. 

But "GmbH" is “Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung“, a company with limited liability, so it's the equivalent of "incorporated" in our usage, or "Limited" in British usage.  Companies organized with shareholders as owners, whose exposure to lawsuits is limited by law.

There was some private ownership, of companies under specified limits of size.  But they were still controlled by State and Party organizations, with little freedom of action left to the owners.

I still have the Zvezda T-60 light tank I bought while in Germany before the fall of the wall. It came with a Soviet Guards badge inside the box. If you've ever built that kit, it is easily one of the worst ones around.

There was another 1/30 scale Soviet tank model one of the other lieutenants had and built. It looked terrible. I believe it was a JS-3 Stalin and the manufacturer began with the letter "O". About on par with the old Lindberg M46 Patton.

Edit: found it https://www.scalemates.com/kits/ogonek-c-38-tank-is-3--614605