mod@tech

If you follow the sport of mixed martial arts, then you no doubt know who Josh “The Warmaster” Barnett is. He won the UFC Heavyweight Championship in 2002, was the LPW Heavyweight World Catch Wrestling Champion in 2018, and aside from that, he also created his own series with Josh Barnett’s Bloodsport, where MMA meets pro-wrestling. What many folks don’t know however, is that professional athlete aside, Barnett is also a rabid automobile enthusiast who owns, wrenches and mentors his students not only in the athletic arena, but under the hood as well. On this episode of the Hemmings Hot Rod BBQ podcast, we sit down to talk muscle cars, automotive technology, and Bourbon, because yes, The Warmaster does that to.

It looked like a charmingly shrunken first-generation Corvair with jet-style air scoops on its flanks. The gleaming red ZAZ 968 was a fascinating curiosity, one whose clattery, air-cooled engine I could imagine hearing run in my head even as I encountered the car silently parked. This 1976 model was nearly 20 years the senior of its new owner, who’d recently acquired it, originally from the country of both its and his birth, Ukraine. The ZAZ 968 had joined a restored VAZ 2103 (Lada 1500), an original Moskvich 412, and a low-mile, late Volvo 240 wagon in the fleet of Roman Grudinin.

Roman stands between his 1982 VAZ 2103 (Lada 1500) and 1976 ZAZ 968; both will star in future Hemmings feature stories.Photo by Mark J. McCourt

I spent quite some time conversing with Roman when we met last summer. This young enthusiast—professionally, a Business Coordination Project Manager at Volvo Car USA—impressed me with his deep knowledge about, and passion for, the Soviet cars that represented his family’s culture. I arranged to visit him at his New Jersey home a few months later to photograph the Lada that he’d personally restored, as well as the ZAZ, and both will star in forthcoming feature stories in Hemmings publications. The 27-year-old, who’s lived in the U.S. since before his second birthday, shared that his transportation interests were broader: along with hosting a Soviet-transportation-focused YouTube channel, he’s driven buses and trains, flown airplanes and helicopters, and has an internationally respected collection of historic LAZ bus memorabilia. Roman offered to discuss what fostered his fascination with mechanical things from that part of the world, all built in an era that ended before he was born.

​The Sound of Petrol Power

“My passion for the LAZ brand started when I was very young, close to three years old. I was in Odesa, Ukraine, with my grandparents at the time. While they had a car, they—like many people owning cars—preferred to use public transport in the city. Because of convenience, this was a much quicker and easier way to get around. A lot of people didn’t park their personal cars close to their house because there was no ability to do that: you would park it in a garage in an outlying area, then you’d have to get to and from that garage, so people didn’t drive their cars daily. Buses are a big part of life for people in Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries. We used buses and trolley buses a lot, and there was one type of bus that stuck out for me more than others. The reason was its sound and smell.

“The Soviet Union and Hungary once had an agreement for joint economic development. In Hungary, there was a large bus manufacturer called Ikarus. They made super-high-quality buses starting in the 1930s, and their 200-series bus became extremely popular. In all honesty, their quality was better than LAZ’s buses at the time, and there were quite a few of them around, but LAZ buses were still in more volume. When I was a kid, for one reason or another, the Ikarus bus didn’t really fascinate me because, A) it looked like a box on wheels and, B) it ran on diesel.

“The gasoline engine on LAZ buses had a specific sound because the engine is in the back and the exhaust is short in length. It sounds almost like a glasspack exhaust system on a Chevy big-block. It was very, very distinctive. As a kid, I was fascinated with the bubbling sound. I always wanted to ride on a LAZ bus, and if one didn’t come, I would ask my grandma to wait for the next. The three-year-old me didn’t understand what they were, why their sound was different… it was just interesting.

“By the time I was seven, I was aware that there were multiple different types of buses, and the ones I liked wore a circle with an upside-down V. I don’t know why, but I was too young to really question it. When as I got a little older, I started to ask, ‘What is that? Why is there an upside-down ‘V’? My grandma laughed and said, ‘That’s not an upside-down V, that’s a Cyrillic L. The L stands for Lviv, that’s a city in Ukraine. I wanted to know why it was on the buses. She said, ‘These buses are called LAZ [ЛАЗ]. They’re made in Lviv, and in Ukrainian, LAZ stands for L’vivs’ky Avtobusnyi Zavod, which translates literally as ‘Lviv Bus Factory.’ I asked where the city of Lviv is, and she told me it’s in Northwest Ukraine, 12 hours away.”

​Learning to Love the LAZ Buses

Because your writer wasn’t familiar with this company and its products, Roman brought me up to speed. LAZ was founded after World War II, in April 1945, and its focus wasn’t initially buses: it manufactured industrial equipment like small trailers and cranes on truck chassis. The first LAZ bus was an advanced experimental unit built in 1956, with mass production beginning the following year. This vehicle contained many ideas new to the Soviet industry including a unit-body, many glass windows, and a rear-mounted engine. The success of the engineers led to them being split off from LAZ to form an all-Soviet bus institute: most Soviet buses and trolley buses, from that point on, would be developed or approved by this organization. Even experimental buses that weren’t mass-produced wore the LAZ logo, so LAZ became a brand every Soviet person knew and could relate to.

“Imagine finding someone who doesn’t know what a Chevy is? Just like every American knows Chevy, every person living in the USSR knew LAZ.”

He continues: “Over the course of some years, I spent time at local bus garages in Odesa. They had LAZ buses, and I was able to familiarize myself mechanically with them at a really high level as a kid. I knew multiple drivers in those garages with grandkids my age who had limited interest in buses, so they enjoyed talking to me, teaching me, and showing me the ropes a bit. The first vehicle I ever drove was a LAZ-695, and that bus was quite large for a first drive!

“When I was 11, I told my grandparents I would really love to go and visit the LAZ plant to see how the buses are made. In concept it seems crazy, but believe it or not, my grandmother and I just got on a train and went to Lviv.

​Close Encounters of the LAZ Kind

“It was a 12-hour train ride, overnight. We walked out of the train station, and I told the cab driver, ‘Take us to the bus factory.’ My grandmother said, ‘He doesn’t know what that is. You’ve got to tell him…” and the driver cut her off mid-sentence, saying, ‘Of course I know what that is, there’s only one bus factory!’ That was kind of funny, I remember it well. When we arrived, we learned the plant didn’t do tours, especially for kids; you had to be 18 or older to walk around the facility because it was considered dangerous. There were places you could trip and fall, or something could hit you—it was a big operation. I was sad, but I didn’t give up. I started talking to the security guards, telling them about my interests around the buses.

“As I was talking to the guards about my experiences at the garages, they realized I wasn’t just a passerby- we’d come all the way from Odesa, and that they really had to show this kid around. They were probably thinking they needed to get permission, so they asked for our information and my grandmother’s cellphone number. We exchanged contacts and left to walk around the city, and then we got a call. They said, ‘Can you come back to the plant?’

​Youthful Brand Ambassador

“I was so excited. We went back and they gave us a tour, after hours. There were no people working, but there were a lot of buses that I saw in mid-production. Not only did I see how they were constructed, I saw a lot of new-model buses I’d never seen before, because the latest models were being made for the capital city, Kyiv, and they hadn’t yet reached Odesa. It was really cool: at that point, I’d connected the circle from a kid being interested in the sound – to someone who would hang around bus garages and would see how they were operated—to someone who, at a young age, was able to see the plant. So we left Lviv with a successful tour of the bus factory,” Roman says with a smile.

He paused in his recounting, offering this aside before resuming his story: “It’s important to note that while I was passionate about this brand, my interest was really all things mechanical.

“After we got back to Odesa, people at the bus plant contacted us via the phone number we’d given and said, ‘Management of the plant found out you were so interested, and got excited about this because they realized not a lot of kids are.’ They asked us to come back, and three days later we were on a train back to Lviv. When got there, I was essentially treated like royalty: they asked me to meet this person and talk to that person and walk around in this area, and then do the same in a different area. They were enthusiastic to show us a lot more than I’d seen on my brief, off-the-books tour three days before. I asked a lot of questions, and it was a much slower pace, so I got to see more.

“They realized, ‘This kid’s different in the sense that he really understands this stuff.’ And they asked my family if they’d leave me there for a week. They would give me a driver and car, and someone would take care of me for the week so that I could hang around with the children of the management of the plant; they wanted my excitement to rub off on those kids, who didn’t really have any interest. I did it—I stayed. And I was having too much fun to leave, so I asked if I could extend it. That turned into a two-week stay. The following year they said, ‘We would love to invest our energy in you. Come back and stay for as long as you want.’ I stayed for a month. And then as I got older, I did this a couple of times over a couple of summers; that turned into me interning and working there.”

The LAZ experiences proved a gateway, Roman reveals: “My visits to Ukraine saw me exploring seven different automotive factories, hopping from one train to another, and as a kid, sneaking into places just to see the vehicles there while pretending I’m supposed to be there.

“It became a part of all our lives. Let me put it this way: I began to work at the plant, and at the headquarters of the holding company, for some time both in-person during summers, and virtually when in the U.S. Amazingly enough, my interest led to my family investing time, money, and energy into the plant, and it became more than just an interest.”

​Hobbyist Turns Historian

The unusually throaty sound of a particular type of bus had ultimately made a dedicated historian of the bus’s manufacturer, as Roman absorbed model information from long-term LAZ employees during his plant visits. He sought articles of memorabilia commemorating decades of the company’s products, most of which were already long gone in history by the time he was born. He’d return home to the U.S. after summer stays in Lviv with newly acquired collectibles.

“I had a hobby that turned into a collection unknowingly, without a goal,” he muses. “People in the plant would say, ‘This book has been in our office for 30 years. We don’t really need it and you might find it interesting. Here, take it.’ It might be a model or a brochure from the 1960s or ’70s. I’d find other little artifacts around the plant.

“After I had accumulated a certain number of things, I started bucketing them in categories: I had scale models. I had books. I had brochures. And when you have two or three of something, you wonder what other ones are out there. When I would walk around the city with my friends, I’d sometimes stumble on a flea market and someone would be selling books. Because the flea market was close to a bus garage, there might be a book on LAZ buses, and I’d buy it. Around this time, Google was becoming popular; I started using it to look at what other people were posting and to see what else is out there. Obviously, my friends weren’t into this stuff so it was a pastime on the side—it didn’t take up more than an hour here and an hour there.”

Roman now displays a small portion of his collection in his tidy home office. While the historical buses and their manufacturer make up the majority of what’s being spotlighted, there are books, models, and other items celebrating Soviet-era mechanical transport in car, train, and plane forms to peruse.

Touring the Collection

Stepping into the office, you’ll encounter a multi-shelf display dedicated to LAZ buses through the years. Another shelf, topped by an impressive large airplane cutaway, contains a variety of books, manuals, and pamphlets, as well as model nameplates off various buses. A glass curio cabinet displays different types of vintage 1960s metal children’s toy buses (LAZ-badged, naturally), employee ID cards to show their design evolution over the years, and more. There’s a shadowbox containing a variety of Soviet-government-designed LAZ pins and postage stamps. The walls are decorated with framed brochures and advertisements, as well as historic photographs taken inside the LAZ plant that are the only ones of their kind in existence. There’s even a poster of the crane that was one of this company’s original products. Much like with Roman’s collection of scale models, as your gaze moves across the wall, you can follow that company’s factory output from its earliest to its last days. Speaking of the factory’s earliest days, he shows me a delicate photo album that he discovered in an abandoned building on the plant property, was subsequently gifted, and is most certainly unique: it contains illustrations, plans, and photographs documenting the plant’s original postwar construction and layout.

​The Homemade Models: Wheels and Wings

Atop the first shelf are two large-scale buses, one of which Roman himself built primarily from wood at the age of 10: he also hand-made some of the smaller bus models on the three shelves below. “I was trying to get a full model lineup together to show the evolution—both production and experimental,” he explains. “I’d acquired some books around certain types, and I didn’t have them in scale-model form. You go online, you can’t find any. You search on forums. While people know of the experimental bus from photos, they don’t know of any scale models of it ever having been produced. There’s this specific bus that was that existed in the 1970s: I want it in my lineup, so I have to make it. On occasion when I had free time after school, I’d look at photos and blueprints and schematics and whatever I could get my hands on. I would start with a certain material and try to figure out how to make certain pieces; it wouldn’t work, and I would try again. Through trial and error, and by going to various craft stores, I was able to acquire materials that worked for this, and was able to make models that filled the gaps of the lineup. It’s not that I like making models—I really don’t—I just wanted to get those specific buses in the model lineup.”

With a hint of assertion, he adds, “I don’t like collecting things with no purpose, and I absolutely hate clutter. That is why I am meticulous about what I add to the collection. Since I fell into this hobby, I feel obligated to preserve the history.”

Equally impressive is Roman’s cutaway airplane model representing an important Soviet jet, the Ilyushin IL-62. This was a COVID-lockdown project: he hand-made this display using household materials while referencing some photos and rough dimensions he found online. It underlines his fascination with all types of mechanical things, particularly those originating from that era and part of the world.

​​Keeper of the Flame

Thanks to his videos and online presence, Roman has an international network of followers and acquaintances who turn to him for information and expertise when researching or restoring Soviet cars and buses. He’s glad to share his passion with like-minded enthusiasts. And in the LAZ-history world, he’s the information source. His interests took him to places all over the world where he’s met people he befriended and continues to remain close to, years on.

“For me, it’s as much about hunting for the rare pieces related to the brand, as it is about the buses and mechanical things themselves. I was a kid who had an interest in big vehicles, which then grew into other mechanical-related things. But the buses were something I could relate to—they were tangible, I could see them on the streets and ride in them. I could go to the garages and hang out, as a kid. I couldn’t do that at an airport, I couldn’t do that at military base. It was the bus garage. The buses I saw as a kid led me down the path of learning about the history and they helped expand my horizons. I don’t have an interest in modern American buses that you see every day because they are too common. My interest was always in Soviet tech. You know what I mean? It’s much more than just LAZ buses and Soviet cars, it’s tech that you can’t see on the street in the U.S. I guess you can say that I like vintage mechanical stuff.”

“Given what I know, I almost take it as a duty to consolidate it in a tangible way so the history is preserved. And believe me, I’m not the only one. There are thousands of people who are interested in this brand. It’s just that I had unique access, like no others did, to materials and information and the actual facility where they were made—at the time, in the biggest bus factory in the world.”

Date: circa 1980s

Location: Columbus, Ohio

Source: Dick Garrett, via Grandview Heights Public Library

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