The Last to Comment Wins
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ElijahRyne
A Hermit that’s NOT that Lazy, currentlycomplainen
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I am winning currently.
Anonjohn20
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Blunder is such a silly word; makes me think of a pirate's blunderbuss.
JayMark
It's Not Easy Being Nobody, But Somebody Has To.
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He blundered and he rides a bus.
JayMark
It's Not Easy Being Nobody, But Somebody Has To.
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psssssssssst. candy mountain Shiririru.
Tempokai
The Overworked One
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The Bus System (working title)
Prologue
Once upon a time, there was a city near the mountains. It had everything a city in the middle of nowhere needed: narrow roads that knew more horses than men, dusty arteries that wound toward forgotten villages only bureaucrats remembered—because somebody had to count the livestock and pretend it mattered. And beyond those roads was the vast, empty steppe, so bumpy and silent it made oral philosophers weep and horses paranoid.
The city, if one could call it that before the 1800s, was not built in a place of strategic brilliance. No ports, no great rivers, unless you count two sisters called Big and Small rivers streaming down from the purple mountains. No precious metals, unless you want to climb those mountains, and even then it was stupid when the neighboring city 500 kilometers ago had everything metal wise. Just farming worthy dirt, breezy wind from the mountain range that mellows down the steppe sun, and a stubborn desire to live inconveniently far from everything useful. Naturally, people settled here.
At first, it was simple. Mud huts from those who settled there permanently. Yurts from those who were nomads. Wooden fortresses from Russians that were useless because no one attacked that region. A tavern that also served as a funeral parlor because there was no big business. A market square that doubled as a gossip pit and occasionally a dueling arena, depending on how poorly the sheep prices went. People bartered, bickered, and brought their livestock into places no livestock should ever be, including but not limited to the town council building that was in that wood fortress.
But even then, the people understood one immutable truth: movement mattered. Whether you were hauling firewood, fermenting pickled cabbage, or dragging sacks of whatever the hell passed for currency before currency, you needed to get from Point A to Point B before the wolves got bored and came sniffing. Sure, every family had a horse, or at least an angry bull named Khan. And so, when some serf thought that even horseless people needed a transport, the first form of public transport was born: a disgruntled mule and the dude both named as Viktor who charged extra if you talked too much.
This system—archaic as it was—functioned with a kind of grumpy brilliance. Roads were dirt and ambition. Wagons creaked like dying poets. Yet everything, somehow, arrived eventually, assuming it didn't freeze to death first.
Then came the 19th century, bringing with it "modernization," a word that here means "more taxes, more uniforms, and absolutely no consultation with the locals." Suddenly, maps were drawn. Official roads were declared, with signage so inconsistent even the goats gave up reading them. Bureaucracy slithered into the city like a particularly smug snake, and with it came the first true municipal disaster: planning.
It was around this time that the city received its first serious attention from a higher authority—a Tsar, a governor, or some other powdered buffoon in a distant palace who pointed at the map and declared, “Yes. This blob looks strategic against the Qing.” And so the blob was blessed. New buildings rose—grand, mismatched things designed by men who had never visited the city and probably couldn’t spell it. Roads were cobbled in ways that confused both locals and cartographers. The city began to grow, not like a tree, but like a tumor—uneven, occasionally aggressive, and hard to treat.
Then, like an ominous drumbeat in the distance, came the Soviets.
It wasn't as subtle anyone would've hoped. Russian Civil War happened, and the city got divided into three factions. Reds, occupying the city, Whites, occupying the steppes, and Locals, trying to become their own thing because frankly, both teams sucked so hard, it was easier to become independent than to listen to their demands. Eventually, Reds won, and the Locals, siding with Whites, seeing that Whites lost, eventually sided with the Reds, given that they had a lot of guns and had the city under the control.
But the city itself, with its crumbling charisma and knack for survival, barely noticed. It had survived wolves, winters, and whatever idiot that proclaimed "I will rule this land!", eventually bringing starvation upon the locals. It would survive this too.
But oh, the Soviets were not here to simply be. They were here to transform. To elevate. Or rather, to execute the Five Year Plans without getting gulaged by the Stalin. Their rhetoric was "to carve progress into the very bones of the earth—even if the bones objected", to which earth objected hard. Cue the earthquake, that destroyed half of the city.
But whatever. Afterwards, factories sprouted like tumors. Uniformity replaced charm. The half destroyed tavern became a people’s canteen. The market square was redubbed Revolution Square and featured a statue of a man who had never set foot within 500 kilometers of the city, but whose stern bronze stare haunted generations of disillusioned children.
Transport, too, was revolutionized. No more mule named Viktor. No, now there were schedules. Routes. Maps that might even be accurate, provided they weren’t revised mid-week for ideological reasons. Roads were straightened like a chairman's posture. Trams and first motorized vehicles were introduced—clunky, ironclad beasts that screeched like they were trying to sing the Internationale through an iron lung. And yes, buses eventually joined the ranks—mechanized boxes of collectivist mobility.
But like all centrally-planned utopias, this one came with fine print:
Buses may arrive at arbitrary times, as determined by the regional politburo or the whims of the gods.
Routes may be redirected to better align with Five-Year Plans, despite being six years behind.
If a bus driver defects, the replacement may or may not be literate.
Yet it functioned. Barely. Miraculously. Like everything else under the regime. People got to work. Supplies arrived, occasionally. Sheep were transported, sometimes. Bureaucrats were shuffled from one identical office to another with the solemn air of chess pieces moved by a drunk player.
In time, the city became... significant. Not because of resources, or genius planning, but because it existed long enough and stubbornly enough to become too big to ignore. It became the capital of that region, despite the furthest city it controlled being thousand kilometers away. It was the urban equivalent of a mole you never liked, but which eventually started collecting rent.
By the late Soviet period, it had grown bloated with contradictions: public housing built on ancient farmland, ancient factories belching smoke near schools, statues of smiling workers in cities where no one smiled anymore. And through it all, the buses ran. I would’ve said they run too much. There were more buses than the "private" cars, because you needed to wait in line for years for that Zhiguly. So, buses ran, unless they weren’t being cannibalized for parts by the mechanic called Ivan or commandeered for parades.
But then, Soviet regime collapsed. Not a bang, but a bureaucratic wheeze. Locals had enough, and after violent student winter protests, the red banners came down, and with them, the illusion of permanence. The central Russian government vanished, only to look upon down that city from far away as the Kremlin. State property became "privatized," a euphemism for looted. Everything—everything—was suddenly for sale: factories, buildings, dreams, transit routes.
And in that post-Soviet vacuum of logic and law, the true miracle happened: the city reinvented its transport system organically. Which, here, means “unregulated chaos driven by capitalism, desperation, and questionable engineering.”
Buses multiplied even more. Not because they were planned, but because they were profitable. Routes appeared where people walked, and vanished where no one paid. A strange thing called "supply and demand emerged", and it was unguided, feral, yet weirdly effective. Like a wolf pack that just so happened to run on diesel.
Thus, a city that began with mules and ended with megaprojects found itself in the 21st century, pretty much independent from external forces, because its status as a capital was removed and moved to the north by the (justifiably) paranoid president.
Prologue
Once upon a time, there was a city near the mountains. It had everything a city in the middle of nowhere needed: narrow roads that knew more horses than men, dusty arteries that wound toward forgotten villages only bureaucrats remembered—because somebody had to count the livestock and pretend it mattered. And beyond those roads was the vast, empty steppe, so bumpy and silent it made oral philosophers weep and horses paranoid.
The city, if one could call it that before the 1800s, was not built in a place of strategic brilliance. No ports, no great rivers, unless you count two sisters called Big and Small rivers streaming down from the purple mountains. No precious metals, unless you want to climb those mountains, and even then it was stupid when the neighboring city 500 kilometers ago had everything metal wise. Just farming worthy dirt, breezy wind from the mountain range that mellows down the steppe sun, and a stubborn desire to live inconveniently far from everything useful. Naturally, people settled here.
At first, it was simple. Mud huts from those who settled there permanently. Yurts from those who were nomads. Wooden fortresses from Russians that were useless because no one attacked that region. A tavern that also served as a funeral parlor because there was no big business. A market square that doubled as a gossip pit and occasionally a dueling arena, depending on how poorly the sheep prices went. People bartered, bickered, and brought their livestock into places no livestock should ever be, including but not limited to the town council building that was in that wood fortress.
But even then, the people understood one immutable truth: movement mattered. Whether you were hauling firewood, fermenting pickled cabbage, or dragging sacks of whatever the hell passed for currency before currency, you needed to get from Point A to Point B before the wolves got bored and came sniffing. Sure, every family had a horse, or at least an angry bull named Khan. And so, when some serf thought that even horseless people needed a transport, the first form of public transport was born: a disgruntled mule and the dude both named as Viktor who charged extra if you talked too much.
This system—archaic as it was—functioned with a kind of grumpy brilliance. Roads were dirt and ambition. Wagons creaked like dying poets. Yet everything, somehow, arrived eventually, assuming it didn't freeze to death first.
Then came the 19th century, bringing with it "modernization," a word that here means "more taxes, more uniforms, and absolutely no consultation with the locals." Suddenly, maps were drawn. Official roads were declared, with signage so inconsistent even the goats gave up reading them. Bureaucracy slithered into the city like a particularly smug snake, and with it came the first true municipal disaster: planning.
It was around this time that the city received its first serious attention from a higher authority—a Tsar, a governor, or some other powdered buffoon in a distant palace who pointed at the map and declared, “Yes. This blob looks strategic against the Qing.” And so the blob was blessed. New buildings rose—grand, mismatched things designed by men who had never visited the city and probably couldn’t spell it. Roads were cobbled in ways that confused both locals and cartographers. The city began to grow, not like a tree, but like a tumor—uneven, occasionally aggressive, and hard to treat.
Then, like an ominous drumbeat in the distance, came the Soviets.
It wasn't as subtle anyone would've hoped. Russian Civil War happened, and the city got divided into three factions. Reds, occupying the city, Whites, occupying the steppes, and Locals, trying to become their own thing because frankly, both teams sucked so hard, it was easier to become independent than to listen to their demands. Eventually, Reds won, and the Locals, siding with Whites, seeing that Whites lost, eventually sided with the Reds, given that they had a lot of guns and had the city under the control.
But the city itself, with its crumbling charisma and knack for survival, barely noticed. It had survived wolves, winters, and whatever idiot that proclaimed "I will rule this land!", eventually bringing starvation upon the locals. It would survive this too.
But oh, the Soviets were not here to simply be. They were here to transform. To elevate. Or rather, to execute the Five Year Plans without getting gulaged by the Stalin. Their rhetoric was "to carve progress into the very bones of the earth—even if the bones objected", to which earth objected hard. Cue the earthquake, that destroyed half of the city.
But whatever. Afterwards, factories sprouted like tumors. Uniformity replaced charm. The half destroyed tavern became a people’s canteen. The market square was redubbed Revolution Square and featured a statue of a man who had never set foot within 500 kilometers of the city, but whose stern bronze stare haunted generations of disillusioned children.
Transport, too, was revolutionized. No more mule named Viktor. No, now there were schedules. Routes. Maps that might even be accurate, provided they weren’t revised mid-week for ideological reasons. Roads were straightened like a chairman's posture. Trams and first motorized vehicles were introduced—clunky, ironclad beasts that screeched like they were trying to sing the Internationale through an iron lung. And yes, buses eventually joined the ranks—mechanized boxes of collectivist mobility.
But like all centrally-planned utopias, this one came with fine print:
Buses may arrive at arbitrary times, as determined by the regional politburo or the whims of the gods.
Routes may be redirected to better align with Five-Year Plans, despite being six years behind.
If a bus driver defects, the replacement may or may not be literate.
Yet it functioned. Barely. Miraculously. Like everything else under the regime. People got to work. Supplies arrived, occasionally. Sheep were transported, sometimes. Bureaucrats were shuffled from one identical office to another with the solemn air of chess pieces moved by a drunk player.
In time, the city became... significant. Not because of resources, or genius planning, but because it existed long enough and stubbornly enough to become too big to ignore. It became the capital of that region, despite the furthest city it controlled being thousand kilometers away. It was the urban equivalent of a mole you never liked, but which eventually started collecting rent.
By the late Soviet period, it had grown bloated with contradictions: public housing built on ancient farmland, ancient factories belching smoke near schools, statues of smiling workers in cities where no one smiled anymore. And through it all, the buses ran. I would’ve said they run too much. There were more buses than the "private" cars, because you needed to wait in line for years for that Zhiguly. So, buses ran, unless they weren’t being cannibalized for parts by the mechanic called Ivan or commandeered for parades.
But then, Soviet regime collapsed. Not a bang, but a bureaucratic wheeze. Locals had enough, and after violent student winter protests, the red banners came down, and with them, the illusion of permanence. The central Russian government vanished, only to look upon down that city from far away as the Kremlin. State property became "privatized," a euphemism for looted. Everything—everything—was suddenly for sale: factories, buildings, dreams, transit routes.
And in that post-Soviet vacuum of logic and law, the true miracle happened: the city reinvented its transport system organically. Which, here, means “unregulated chaos driven by capitalism, desperation, and questionable engineering.”
Buses multiplied even more. Not because they were planned, but because they were profitable. Routes appeared where people walked, and vanished where no one paid. A strange thing called "supply and demand emerged", and it was unguided, feral, yet weirdly effective. Like a wolf pack that just so happened to run on diesel.
Thus, a city that began with mules and ended with megaprojects found itself in the 21st century, pretty much independent from external forces, because its status as a capital was removed and moved to the north by the (justifiably) paranoid president.
sellgoldndiamond
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Anonjohn20
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?
Shiriru_B
Book binge in progress.
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Nayhayhayhayhayhayhayhayhayhayhay.
Anonjohn20
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I couldn't find a hay nor a wheat emoji.Nayhayhayhayhayhayhayhayhayhayhay.
Daydreamers
ⴼⵓⴰⴷ ⵃⴰⵊⴰⵣⵉ
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Good morning
Anonjohn20
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Tempokai
The Overworked One
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I'm winning currently by going back to work after procrastinating for an hour.
Once upon a time, there was a city near the mountains. It had everything a city in the middle of nowhere needed: narrow roads that knew more horses than men, dusty arteries that wound toward forgotten villages only bureaucrats remembered—because somebody had to count the livestock and pretend it mattered. Beyond those roads lay the vast, empty steppe, so bumpy and silent it made oral philosophers weep and horses paranoid.
The city, if one could call it that before the 1800s, was not built in a place of strategic brilliance. No ports. No great rivers, unless you count two sisters called the Big and the Small streaming down from the purple mountains. No precious metals, unless you wanted to climb those mountains—and even then it was stupid, when the neighboring city five hundred kilometers away had everything, metal‑wise. Just farming‑worthy dirt, a breezy wind from the mountain range that mellowed the steppe sun, and a stubborn desire to live inconveniently far from everything useful. Naturally, people settled here.
At first, it was simple. Mud huts for those who settled permanently. Yurts for the nomads. Wooden fortresses from Russians that were useless because no one attacked that region. A tavern that also served as a funeral parlor, because there was no big business. A market square that doubled as a gossip pit and, occasionally, a dueling arena, depending on how poorly sheep prices went. People bartered, bickered, and brought their livestock into places no livestock should ever be, including, but not limited to, the town‑council building inside that wooden fortress.
Even then, the people understood one immutable truth: movement mattered. Whether you were hauling firewood, fermenting pickled cabbage, or dragging sacks of whatever passed for currency before currency, you needed to get from Point A to Point B before the wolves got bored and came sniffing. Sure, every family had a horse—or at least an angry bull named Khan, but he was for the plow, not for the driving. So, when some serf decided even horseless people needed transport, the first form of public transit was born: a disgruntled mule and the dude both named Viktor, who charged extra if you talked too much.
This system—archaic as it was—functioned with a kind of grumpy brilliance. Roads were dirt and ambition. Wagons creaked like dying poets. Yet everything somehow arrived eventually, assuming it didn’t freeze to death first.
Then came the nineteenth century, bringing with it "modernization," a word that here means more taxes, more uniforms, and absolutely no consultation with the locals. Suddenly, maps were drawn. Official roads were declared, with signage so inconsistent even the goats gave up reading it. Bureaucracy slithered into the city like a particularly smug snake, and with it came the first true municipal disaster: planning.
It was around this time that the city received its first serious attention from a higher authority—a tsar, a governor, or some other powdered buffoon in a distant palace who pointed at the map and declared, “Yes. This blob looks strategic against the Qing.” And so the blob was blessed. New buildings rose—grand, mismatched things designed by men who had never visited the city and probably couldn’t spell its name without biting their tongues. Roads were cobbled in ways that confused both locals and cartographers. The city began to grow, not like a tree but like a tumor—uneven, occasionally aggressive, and hard to treat.
Then, like an ominous drumbeat in the distance, came the Soviets.
It wasn’t as subtle as anyone would have hoped. The Russian Civil War erupted, and the city was divided among three factions: Reds occupying the city, Whites occupying the steppes, and locals trying to become their own thing because, frankly, both teams sucked so hard it was easier to declare independence than to listen to their demands. Eventually, the Reds won, and the locals—who had sided with the Whites—saw that the Whites had lost and eventually sided with the Reds, given that the Reds had a lot of guns and controlled the city.
But the city itself, with its crumbling charisma and knack for survival, barely noticed. It had survived wolves, winters, and every idiot who proclaimed, “I will rule this land!” only to bring starvation upon the populace. It would survive this too.
Yet the Soviets were not here simply to be. They were here to transform, to elevate—or rather, to execute the Five‑Year Plans without getting gulagged by Stalin. Their rhetoric was to carve progress into the very bones of the earth—even if the bones objected. The earth objected hard. Cue the earthquake that destroyed half the city.
But whatever. Afterward, factories sprouted like tumors. Uniformity replaced charm. The half‑destroyed tavern became a people’s canteen. The market square was redubbed Revolution Square and featured a statue of a man who had never set foot within five hundred kilometers of the city, but whose stern bronze stare haunted generations of disillusioned kids.
Transport, too, was revolutionized. No more mule named Viktor. Now there were schedules, routes, maps that might even be accurate—provided they weren’t revised mid‑week for ideological reasons. Roads were straightened like a chairman’s posture. Trams, trolleybuses and the first motorized vehicles were introduced—clunky, ironclad beasts that screeched as if trying to sing the Internationale through an iron lung. And yes, buses eventually joined the ranks—mechanized boxes of collectivist mobility.
Like all centrally planned utopias, this one came with fine print:
• Buses may arrive at arbitrary times, as determined by the regional politburo or the whims of the gods.
• Routes may be redirected to better align with Five‑Year Plans, despite being six years behind.
• If a bus driver defects, the replacement may or may not be literate.
Yet it functioned—barely, miraculously, like everything else under the regime. People got to work. Supplies arrived, occasionally. Sheep were transported, sometimes. Bureaucrats shuffled from one identical office to another with all the solemnity of chess pieces moved by a drunk player.
In time, the city became… significant. Not because of resources or genius planning but because it existed long enough and stubbornly enough to become too big to ignore. It became the capital of the region, despite the furthest city it controlled being a thousand kilometers away. It was the urban equivalent of a mole you never liked but which eventually started collecting rent.
By the late Soviet period, it had grown bloated with contradictions: public housing built on ancient farmland, ancient factories belching smoke near schools, statues of smiling workers in cities where no one smiled anymore. And through it all, the buses ran. There were more buses than "private" cars, because you had to wait in line for years for a Zhiguli. So buses ran—unless they were being cannibalized for parts by the mechanic called Ivan or commandeered for parades.
Then the Soviet regime collapsed—not with a bang but with a bureaucratic wheeze. Locals had had enough, and after violent student winter protests, the red banners came down, along with the illusion of permanence. The central Russian government receded, leaving the city to stare at the Kremlin from afar. State property became "privatized," a euphemism for looted. Everything—factories, buildings, dreams, transit routes—was suddenly for sale.
In that post‑Soviet vacuum of logic and law, a true miracle happened: the city reinvented its transport system organically, which here means unregulated chaos driven by capitalism, desperation, and questionable engineering.
Buses multiplied even more—not because they were planned, but because they were profitable. Routes appeared where people walked and vanished where no one paid. A strange thing called supply and demand emerged, unguided, feral, yet weirdly effective—like a wolf pack that just happened to run on diesel.
Thus, a city that began with mules and ended with megaprojects found itself in the twenty‑first century. It became pretty much independent of external forces, because its status as a capital had been removed and moved north by the (justifiably) paranoid president. And now, the story truly begins.
By late 1990s, the internal state of the city got stabilized. Sure, it was demoted from being a capital to yet another administrative region, but nothing had changed from that. It was still the financial, cultural, historical capital of the newly independent country, give or take poverty of the state and sheer unintentional chaos fall of the Reds had caused. The Bus System was going strong, even when there was no money from the higher ups to sustain it. Let us meet our protagonists at that time:
LiAZ‑677 high‑floor buses: This contraption rolled off the Likino Bus Plant assembly line back in 1967 and kept going with the dedication of a Soviet bureaucrat clinging to his desk post-collapse. Official production ended in 1994, but "unofficial" assembly continued well into the early 2000s—because why let death get in the way of a good tradition? At over 10.5 meters long and weighing in around 8.3 tons empty (not including the weight of the former proletariat), the LiAZ-677 could cram in about 110 passengers, assuming they didn't mind sacrificing their personal space and possibly their spinal alignment. It featured a high-floor design—ideal for reminding the elderly of their mortality every time they had to climb in—and had two doors, which worked sometimes.
This was the USSR’s first city bus with an automatic gearbox, presumably to reduce the number of drivers needing hernia surgeries. Powered by an honest-to-Lenin ZIL engine (the 375Я7 or later 509.10 variants), it belched black smoke with enough vigor to darken the soul of anyone following behind it in traffic. The chassis was about as forgiving as a gulag commander, but at least it was robust. Like most Soviet designs, the LiAZ-677 was built not with grace or efficiency in mind, but with the singular purpose of surviving apocalypse, invasion, or the daily abuse of municipal operation.
LiAZ‑5256 Large‑Class (High‑Floor) Buses: Arrived in 1986 to replace its glorious but asthmatic ancestor. This big boy came in at 11.4 meters long and had a gross weight of 17.4 tons—a subtle nod to the fact that it was not just a bus, but also a rolling compactor, causing unparalleled damage to the poor newly imported western cars when they collided (it happened often, but that's the story for another day). Seating arrangements depended on whether it was an “urban” or “suburban” variant, with the former designed to fit about 117 passengers—roughly the population of a mid-sized village, if said village was comfortable standing cheek-to-jowl in a tin can.
Also high-floor (because low-floor technology was apparently witchcraft at the time), the LiAZ-5256 was blessed with three doors, a slight mercy for the hapless masses. Under the hood, you could find a buffet of diesel options—KamAZ, Caterpillar, Cummins, YaMZ—making it less of a bus and more of a Frankenstein's monster of global engine technologies. There were even compressed natural gas versions, presumably for the five people in the country who cared about emissions. It topped out at 110 km/h, though reaching that speed would likely involve a steep hill, a tailwind, and divine intervention. It was the bus from the new Russia—larger, heavier, more chaotic, and still very much welded together with the ghost of the USSR.
LAZ‑695H medium‑capacity buses: Oh, the LAZ. Born in the Lviv Bus Factory, back when the Soviet Union still believed that perestroika will keep the Union intact. This medium-capacity machine started life in 1956 and, through sheer stubbornness and a total disregard for modernity, kept going until 2002—longer, if you count the knockoffs built by DAZ up to 2010. Shorter than its LiAZ cousins at 9.2 meters, this bus was the jack-of-all-trades of Soviet transit: city shuttle, suburban creeper, village minibus, and occasional funeral hearse (probably not officially, but one can imagine).
It seated about 30–34 humans with standing room for roughly 26 more—assuming nobody had too much calories that morning. A high-floor layout and rear-engine design meant it handled like a drunk elephant but at least kept most of the noise where it belonged: behind the driver. Early models ran on glorious gasoline engines—a six-cylinder ZIL 124 or, for those who needed to really move, a V8 ZIL-130L pushing 150 horses to their collective doom. Later versions swapped to diesel engines, like the MMZ-D245.9 or YaMZ-236A, which gave the bus a little more torque and a lot more terrifying rattles. Transmission was mostly manual (because Soviet drivers needed something to do with their hands besides smoke), though a few brave attempts at automatics were made, usually with results best left unspoken.
The LAZ-695H became one of the most common midsize buses in the Union and in this city, a reliable enough connection between the pocket-sized PAZ buses and the full-scale LiAZs. It was rugged, easy to maintain (assuming you had a wrench, a hammer, and a complete disregard for safety), and could be fixed in a field by a man named Yuri with one eye and half a tooth. It was the bus you learned to hate while also trusting it with your life.
PAZ‑32051 medium‑capacity buses: Born in 1989 at the Pavlovo Bus Factory and running well into the early 2000s, this compact bruiser was the go-to for villages, cramped city streets, and anywhere larger buses feared to tread. At just 7 meters long but still able to stuff in 59 passengers (give or take a chicken or two), it was essentially a metal loaf of bread on wheels—dense, functional, and vaguely warm from engine heat leaking into the cabin.
It came with a trusty ZMZ V8 carbureted engine—because of course it was carbureted, why not make fueling a game of roulette? That 130 horsepower was channeled through a 4-speed manual transmission to the rear axle, ensuring you felt every pothole with emotional clarity. Two skinny accordion-style doors handled passenger flow, sort of, and the high floor meant boarding was a minor CrossFit session.
With just over 5 tons of curb weight and solid ground clearance, it was durable, cheap to fix, and basically indestructible, much like your babushka’s enamel pot. Perfect for rural routes, underfunded city loops, and heroic last stands during snowstorms. Not glamorous, not fast, but always there—like bureaucratic paperwork or a flat tire.
So, by the time Soviet Union was dead for half of a decade, the life for these ancient behemoths turned to worse. Given that every factory that produced spare parts got privatized, destroyed, stolen, you name it, the drivers had no choice but to retrofit or cannibalize other buses (especially for LiAZ‑5256s ). By the year 1999, the bus system in that city was highly privatized, with a patchwork of carriers—some efficient, many under‑resourced, and many highly specialized in making the buses work for yet another year. It was a rustbucket miracle that those Ivans, Kairats, and Alibeks could sustain the public service for so long. Not to mention:
Ikarus-250
Ikarus-256
Ikarus-25059
Ikarus-260.50
Ikarus-280
Karosa B732
KAVZ-3976
NeFAZ-5299-10-04
...and other buses, and there's one unanswered question. How in the world the city didn't get crippled movement wise? Enter, bureaucracy.
Prologue
Once upon a time, there was a city near the mountains. It had everything a city in the middle of nowhere needed: narrow roads that knew more horses than men, dusty arteries that wound toward forgotten villages only bureaucrats remembered—because somebody had to count the livestock and pretend it mattered. Beyond those roads lay the vast, empty steppe, so bumpy and silent it made oral philosophers weep and horses paranoid.
The city, if one could call it that before the 1800s, was not built in a place of strategic brilliance. No ports. No great rivers, unless you count two sisters called the Big and the Small streaming down from the purple mountains. No precious metals, unless you wanted to climb those mountains—and even then it was stupid, when the neighboring city five hundred kilometers away had everything, metal‑wise. Just farming‑worthy dirt, a breezy wind from the mountain range that mellowed the steppe sun, and a stubborn desire to live inconveniently far from everything useful. Naturally, people settled here.
At first, it was simple. Mud huts for those who settled permanently. Yurts for the nomads. Wooden fortresses from Russians that were useless because no one attacked that region. A tavern that also served as a funeral parlor, because there was no big business. A market square that doubled as a gossip pit and, occasionally, a dueling arena, depending on how poorly sheep prices went. People bartered, bickered, and brought their livestock into places no livestock should ever be, including, but not limited to, the town‑council building inside that wooden fortress.
Even then, the people understood one immutable truth: movement mattered. Whether you were hauling firewood, fermenting pickled cabbage, or dragging sacks of whatever passed for currency before currency, you needed to get from Point A to Point B before the wolves got bored and came sniffing. Sure, every family had a horse—or at least an angry bull named Khan, but he was for the plow, not for the driving. So, when some serf decided even horseless people needed transport, the first form of public transit was born: a disgruntled mule and the dude both named Viktor, who charged extra if you talked too much.
This system—archaic as it was—functioned with a kind of grumpy brilliance. Roads were dirt and ambition. Wagons creaked like dying poets. Yet everything somehow arrived eventually, assuming it didn’t freeze to death first.
Then came the nineteenth century, bringing with it "modernization," a word that here means more taxes, more uniforms, and absolutely no consultation with the locals. Suddenly, maps were drawn. Official roads were declared, with signage so inconsistent even the goats gave up reading it. Bureaucracy slithered into the city like a particularly smug snake, and with it came the first true municipal disaster: planning.
It was around this time that the city received its first serious attention from a higher authority—a tsar, a governor, or some other powdered buffoon in a distant palace who pointed at the map and declared, “Yes. This blob looks strategic against the Qing.” And so the blob was blessed. New buildings rose—grand, mismatched things designed by men who had never visited the city and probably couldn’t spell its name without biting their tongues. Roads were cobbled in ways that confused both locals and cartographers. The city began to grow, not like a tree but like a tumor—uneven, occasionally aggressive, and hard to treat.
Then, like an ominous drumbeat in the distance, came the Soviets.
It wasn’t as subtle as anyone would have hoped. The Russian Civil War erupted, and the city was divided among three factions: Reds occupying the city, Whites occupying the steppes, and locals trying to become their own thing because, frankly, both teams sucked so hard it was easier to declare independence than to listen to their demands. Eventually, the Reds won, and the locals—who had sided with the Whites—saw that the Whites had lost and eventually sided with the Reds, given that the Reds had a lot of guns and controlled the city.
But the city itself, with its crumbling charisma and knack for survival, barely noticed. It had survived wolves, winters, and every idiot who proclaimed, “I will rule this land!” only to bring starvation upon the populace. It would survive this too.
Yet the Soviets were not here simply to be. They were here to transform, to elevate—or rather, to execute the Five‑Year Plans without getting gulagged by Stalin. Their rhetoric was to carve progress into the very bones of the earth—even if the bones objected. The earth objected hard. Cue the earthquake that destroyed half the city.
But whatever. Afterward, factories sprouted like tumors. Uniformity replaced charm. The half‑destroyed tavern became a people’s canteen. The market square was redubbed Revolution Square and featured a statue of a man who had never set foot within five hundred kilometers of the city, but whose stern bronze stare haunted generations of disillusioned kids.
Transport, too, was revolutionized. No more mule named Viktor. Now there were schedules, routes, maps that might even be accurate—provided they weren’t revised mid‑week for ideological reasons. Roads were straightened like a chairman’s posture. Trams, trolleybuses and the first motorized vehicles were introduced—clunky, ironclad beasts that screeched as if trying to sing the Internationale through an iron lung. And yes, buses eventually joined the ranks—mechanized boxes of collectivist mobility.
Like all centrally planned utopias, this one came with fine print:
• Buses may arrive at arbitrary times, as determined by the regional politburo or the whims of the gods.
• Routes may be redirected to better align with Five‑Year Plans, despite being six years behind.
• If a bus driver defects, the replacement may or may not be literate.
Yet it functioned—barely, miraculously, like everything else under the regime. People got to work. Supplies arrived, occasionally. Sheep were transported, sometimes. Bureaucrats shuffled from one identical office to another with all the solemnity of chess pieces moved by a drunk player.
In time, the city became… significant. Not because of resources or genius planning but because it existed long enough and stubbornly enough to become too big to ignore. It became the capital of the region, despite the furthest city it controlled being a thousand kilometers away. It was the urban equivalent of a mole you never liked but which eventually started collecting rent.
By the late Soviet period, it had grown bloated with contradictions: public housing built on ancient farmland, ancient factories belching smoke near schools, statues of smiling workers in cities where no one smiled anymore. And through it all, the buses ran. There were more buses than "private" cars, because you had to wait in line for years for a Zhiguli. So buses ran—unless they were being cannibalized for parts by the mechanic called Ivan or commandeered for parades.
Then the Soviet regime collapsed—not with a bang but with a bureaucratic wheeze. Locals had had enough, and after violent student winter protests, the red banners came down, along with the illusion of permanence. The central Russian government receded, leaving the city to stare at the Kremlin from afar. State property became "privatized," a euphemism for looted. Everything—factories, buildings, dreams, transit routes—was suddenly for sale.
In that post‑Soviet vacuum of logic and law, a true miracle happened: the city reinvented its transport system organically, which here means unregulated chaos driven by capitalism, desperation, and questionable engineering.
Buses multiplied even more—not because they were planned, but because they were profitable. Routes appeared where people walked and vanished where no one paid. A strange thing called supply and demand emerged, unguided, feral, yet weirdly effective—like a wolf pack that just happened to run on diesel.
Thus, a city that began with mules and ended with megaprojects found itself in the twenty‑first century. It became pretty much independent of external forces, because its status as a capital had been removed and moved north by the (justifiably) paranoid president. And now, the story truly begins.
Part 1. CATALOGUE OF BUSES
By late 1990s, the internal state of the city got stabilized. Sure, it was demoted from being a capital to yet another administrative region, but nothing had changed from that. It was still the financial, cultural, historical capital of the newly independent country, give or take poverty of the state and sheer unintentional chaos fall of the Reds had caused. The Bus System was going strong, even when there was no money from the higher ups to sustain it. Let us meet our protagonists at that time:
LiAZ‑677 high‑floor buses: This contraption rolled off the Likino Bus Plant assembly line back in 1967 and kept going with the dedication of a Soviet bureaucrat clinging to his desk post-collapse. Official production ended in 1994, but "unofficial" assembly continued well into the early 2000s—because why let death get in the way of a good tradition? At over 10.5 meters long and weighing in around 8.3 tons empty (not including the weight of the former proletariat), the LiAZ-677 could cram in about 110 passengers, assuming they didn't mind sacrificing their personal space and possibly their spinal alignment. It featured a high-floor design—ideal for reminding the elderly of their mortality every time they had to climb in—and had two doors, which worked sometimes.
This was the USSR’s first city bus with an automatic gearbox, presumably to reduce the number of drivers needing hernia surgeries. Powered by an honest-to-Lenin ZIL engine (the 375Я7 or later 509.10 variants), it belched black smoke with enough vigor to darken the soul of anyone following behind it in traffic. The chassis was about as forgiving as a gulag commander, but at least it was robust. Like most Soviet designs, the LiAZ-677 was built not with grace or efficiency in mind, but with the singular purpose of surviving apocalypse, invasion, or the daily abuse of municipal operation.
LiAZ‑5256 Large‑Class (High‑Floor) Buses: Arrived in 1986 to replace its glorious but asthmatic ancestor. This big boy came in at 11.4 meters long and had a gross weight of 17.4 tons—a subtle nod to the fact that it was not just a bus, but also a rolling compactor, causing unparalleled damage to the poor newly imported western cars when they collided (it happened often, but that's the story for another day). Seating arrangements depended on whether it was an “urban” or “suburban” variant, with the former designed to fit about 117 passengers—roughly the population of a mid-sized village, if said village was comfortable standing cheek-to-jowl in a tin can.
Also high-floor (because low-floor technology was apparently witchcraft at the time), the LiAZ-5256 was blessed with three doors, a slight mercy for the hapless masses. Under the hood, you could find a buffet of diesel options—KamAZ, Caterpillar, Cummins, YaMZ—making it less of a bus and more of a Frankenstein's monster of global engine technologies. There were even compressed natural gas versions, presumably for the five people in the country who cared about emissions. It topped out at 110 km/h, though reaching that speed would likely involve a steep hill, a tailwind, and divine intervention. It was the bus from the new Russia—larger, heavier, more chaotic, and still very much welded together with the ghost of the USSR.
LAZ‑695H medium‑capacity buses: Oh, the LAZ. Born in the Lviv Bus Factory, back when the Soviet Union still believed that perestroika will keep the Union intact. This medium-capacity machine started life in 1956 and, through sheer stubbornness and a total disregard for modernity, kept going until 2002—longer, if you count the knockoffs built by DAZ up to 2010. Shorter than its LiAZ cousins at 9.2 meters, this bus was the jack-of-all-trades of Soviet transit: city shuttle, suburban creeper, village minibus, and occasional funeral hearse (probably not officially, but one can imagine).
It seated about 30–34 humans with standing room for roughly 26 more—assuming nobody had too much calories that morning. A high-floor layout and rear-engine design meant it handled like a drunk elephant but at least kept most of the noise where it belonged: behind the driver. Early models ran on glorious gasoline engines—a six-cylinder ZIL 124 or, for those who needed to really move, a V8 ZIL-130L pushing 150 horses to their collective doom. Later versions swapped to diesel engines, like the MMZ-D245.9 or YaMZ-236A, which gave the bus a little more torque and a lot more terrifying rattles. Transmission was mostly manual (because Soviet drivers needed something to do with their hands besides smoke), though a few brave attempts at automatics were made, usually with results best left unspoken.
The LAZ-695H became one of the most common midsize buses in the Union and in this city, a reliable enough connection between the pocket-sized PAZ buses and the full-scale LiAZs. It was rugged, easy to maintain (assuming you had a wrench, a hammer, and a complete disregard for safety), and could be fixed in a field by a man named Yuri with one eye and half a tooth. It was the bus you learned to hate while also trusting it with your life.
PAZ‑32051 medium‑capacity buses: Born in 1989 at the Pavlovo Bus Factory and running well into the early 2000s, this compact bruiser was the go-to for villages, cramped city streets, and anywhere larger buses feared to tread. At just 7 meters long but still able to stuff in 59 passengers (give or take a chicken or two), it was essentially a metal loaf of bread on wheels—dense, functional, and vaguely warm from engine heat leaking into the cabin.
It came with a trusty ZMZ V8 carbureted engine—because of course it was carbureted, why not make fueling a game of roulette? That 130 horsepower was channeled through a 4-speed manual transmission to the rear axle, ensuring you felt every pothole with emotional clarity. Two skinny accordion-style doors handled passenger flow, sort of, and the high floor meant boarding was a minor CrossFit session.
With just over 5 tons of curb weight and solid ground clearance, it was durable, cheap to fix, and basically indestructible, much like your babushka’s enamel pot. Perfect for rural routes, underfunded city loops, and heroic last stands during snowstorms. Not glamorous, not fast, but always there—like bureaucratic paperwork or a flat tire.
So, by the time Soviet Union was dead for half of a decade, the life for these ancient behemoths turned to worse. Given that every factory that produced spare parts got privatized, destroyed, stolen, you name it, the drivers had no choice but to retrofit or cannibalize other buses (especially for LiAZ‑5256s ). By the year 1999, the bus system in that city was highly privatized, with a patchwork of carriers—some efficient, many under‑resourced, and many highly specialized in making the buses work for yet another year. It was a rustbucket miracle that those Ivans, Kairats, and Alibeks could sustain the public service for so long. Not to mention:
Ikarus-250
Ikarus-256
Ikarus-25059
Ikarus-260.50
Ikarus-280
Karosa B732
KAVZ-3976
NeFAZ-5299-10-04
...and other buses, and there's one unanswered question. How in the world the city didn't get crippled movement wise? Enter, bureaucracy.
Edenc2708
Noob Dice
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- Apr 18, 2025
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Sometimes I stand, sometimes i crouch while doing that....