Motorcycles were a vital part of the transportation system in Europe before World War II—they weren’t toys. As the war against Hitler turned into the Cold War against Stalin/Mao/etc., countries in western Europe shifted toward cars, and the bikes they rode were brands we’re familiar with even today: Brit bikes, BMWs, Moto Guzzis, and the Japanese machines.

But on the other side of the Iron Curtain, they had other machines that we might have known about, and maybe they were exported to Western Europe, but they rarely appeared in the US: Ural, Dnepr, Jawa.

Jawa is probably best known for its two-stroke 350s, and here, you see a Jawa 640 RED STYLE, as sold to the New Zealand market, now profiled on the@SmallBikeStuff YouTube channel. This bike was made in the 1990s, but the engines hadn’t developed much at that point. As the title says, it was still basically 1950s tech—but it was an interesting, if quirky design. Stuff like that dual-purpose kickstarter is maybe an answer to a question that nobody really asked, but it’s still a cool idea.

Jawa sold a lot of these bikes in India, where they are perhaps best-loved at this point, as they were some of the fastest machines on the street there. But even though they are antiquated, these old two-smokers do have a fanbase. One good place to check ’em out is theSiegfried von Stern YouTube channel, where he shows you how to tune these bikes to wheelie-popping power.

Unbelievably, they made these two-stroke engines all the way to 2019:

Jawa also had a run of four-strokes in the 1990s, including a big 650 with an engine from Rotax. The company is still active today, sort of,selling rebadged Chinese bikes. Indian manufacturing giant Mahindra isalso selling bikeswith the Jawa badge. It’s a bit hard to keep the players straight on the scorecard, but whatever you buy with the Jawa badge these days, it’s likely to be quite a bit more advanced than the two-smokers seen above, if not as classy.