On Avito, they sell Brezhnev's limousine for 54 million rubles

If you have an extra 54 million rubles, you can become the proud owner of the legendary ZIL, which, as they say, grandfather Brezhnev himself drove. But this is not accurate.

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An offer for the sale of a ZIL car, allegedly once owned by Leonid Brezhnev, the General secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, appeared on the Avito classifieds website.

The owner of the 1972 car asks for 54 million rubles for it. In addition, he is ready to exchange the car for real estate.

The mileage of ZIL 117 is 10 thousand kilometers. The car has a V8 petrol engine with a capacity of 303 horsepower. The motor is paired with an automatic transmission.

At the same time, the seller did not specify whether he had documents proving that the car belonged to the Soviet leader.

The ZIL-117 is a Soviet top—class passenger car with a sedan body, was created in 1971 on the basis of the ZIL-114 government limousine and had the same strict and harmonious forms. However, these cars were usually used as escort vehicles, and the first persons of the country moved in ZIL-114 limousines.

There was a claim that the ZIL-117 was a "driver's" version created by personal order of L. I. Brezhnev, who loved to drive a car personally. There is a lot of eyewitness evidence that back in the second half of the 1970s, the Secretary General personally managed the "short" ZIL.

A total of 50 such machines were produced from 1971 to 1978. A smaller part of them have survived to this day.

According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Brezhnev had a passion for cars and fast driving. According to various sources, there were from 49 to 324 cars in his car collection. There are cases when he put the lives of foreign leaders in danger with his daredevilism.

Formally, many cars from the collection did not belong to Brezhnev personally, but to the Central Committee apparatus, but were made specifically for him. The cars were stored in the Kremlin's Special Purpose Garage and at Brezhnev's dacha in Zarechye, Moscow region. After the death of the Secretary General, the cars were confiscated from his family, the collection was fragmented.

This is not the first time this year when vehicles of famous people of the past were sold. So, on August 18, 2017, an armored Mercedes-Benz S-Class (W140) limousine used by Boris Yeltsin was put up for sale in St. Petersburg. The owner asked for more than 19 million rubles for a 1994 car with a mileage of 60 thousand kilometers. Three days later, an unknown collector bought the car for 19.7 million rubles.