After seeing a recent episode of the automotive program Top Gear, I had an idea. The show wanted to find out if the Soviet Union ever made a good car. So I decided to see what the Soviet Union had to offer for motorcycles. The answer... well it's confusing.
First off all Russian motorcycle "companies" have very strange names (for westerners anyway). Names like GMZ, IMZ, MMZ, PMZ, TIZ, TMZ, and so on. Why does every thing have an MZ? I don't know, maybe it's some communist thing. Another thing I discovered was that almost every Soviet motorcycle was simply a copy of some European motorcycle. Mostly copies of BMW's R71 and the German DKW RT175, taken as war reparations. Something could be said of the similarities of China's motorcycle offerings.
The most well known Russian bike (at least in the USA) has to be the IMZ ( Irbitskiy Mototsikletniy Zavod) Ural. In preparation for war with Germany in the 1940's the Russians sought out to create a motorcycle that could survive the demands of Russia's terrain. The Reds got a hold of some BMW R71's and reverse engineered their own version of the built proof design. The motorcycles were to be built in the remote Ural mountains, out of German bombing ranges. In the 1950's the motorcycles were adapted for civilian use. Today Ural's are sold in dozens of countries around the world.
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