Meet Irina Olkhovskaya, one of Playboy's 55th anniversary cover models. But she isn't just some has-been bunny, she's a car show host.

The MiG-15 dominated the skies when made its debut in the Korean war. One of the USSR's first successful swept-wing aircraft it has since become the most-built jet of all time. Our friends at Oobject have assembled the most soaring monuments to the Soviet's favorite fighter.

We'd all love an obsessively detailed 1:18 scale Volvo 240 coupe on our desks, of course, but no collection of automotive tchotchkes is complete without some Soviet iron!

Saturday morning, the competitors of the Mutually Assured Destruction of Omaha 24 Hours of LeMons race had just entered the track for transponder testing laps when this hunk of vintage Soviet iron came screaming by at low altitude.

Once again, English Russia comes through with a great car photo.

Alex Severinsky, a Soviet emigrant who began his career developing antitank-warfare instrumentation, patented a system for powering gas-electric hybrids in 1994. Toyota used his system for the Prius without permission or payment. Until this week.

In the U.S.S.R. the winters are cold and the cars are strange. Here's your best choices for the ten most awesome and strange cars the collective ever produced.

Let's say you could go back to the early 1950s and snag a super-futuristic prototype automobile as your 2009 daily driver. Which side of the Iron Curtain would you choose?

All these Engine Of The Day honors, and no Russian iron? And yesterday was May Day, comrades? We're going to remedy that oversight right now!

57Sweptside loves junkyards, and not just the ones in his native Southwest. He's found for us this collection of photos shot in a Russian yard packed full of Volgas, Moskviches, and even Tchaikas.

The Space Hijackers shenanigans pulled at the G20 Summit piqued you're interested in a siege tank of your own? Guess what, there's a BRDM-2 in Volo, IL with your name on it.

This is Down On The Street Bonus Edition, where we check out interesting street-parked cars located in places other than the Island That Rust Forgot. Anything is possible, even a Volga in Southern California!

Have we ever mentioned that we love English Russia? It's like they knew we were going to review Cars Of The Soviet Union and put up this collection of vintage Soviet racing photos for us!

Whether you're wrenching on a flying Spitfire or a leaking Spitfire, Haynes has a shop manual for you. Very useful, but hardly the sort of thing you'd keep on your coffee table.

I'd planned to review this totally addictive book today, but I haven't yet got permission to use the photos. But, dammit, racing Moskviches are cool, so we need some kind of vintage Soviet car fix!

Are those louvers for a rear-engine setup in this Volga, perhaps some nightmarish GAZ-ZAZ hybrid?

This is Down On The Street Bonus Edition, where we check out interesting street-parked cars located in places other than the Island That Rust Forgot. Today we're heading back to Toronto, a city that's given us all manner of interesting old iron in the past, from the Alfa Romeo Giulia Nuova Super 1600 to just about…