I picked up the novel Eye of the Red Tsar, which is set in 1929 at the end of summer, roughly between Oreshek, Sverdlovsk and Vodovenko in the USSR, and I find that the novel has a strange relationship with cars.
A gas station near Sverdlovsk essentially says that there were more cars passing through in the past, but at the time of the novel most people now take the train.
This seems weird to me, since if I remember correctly, The Sound and the Fury presents cars as this dangerous, new and eccentric invention.
Were cars more common in Russia in the 1910's than in the 1920's?
Also, all the fields in the area are said to be abandonned. Houses, towns, gas stations and shelters are pretty much all described as being either abandonned, or decrepit.
The novel seems to imply that the poor state of the country comes from a couple years ago, when the government took the land from the owners to give it to the people of the area, who had no idea how to work it, thus creating a famine that killed 5 millions people. Is this accurate, and if so, what event is the novel referring to?