 The Niva was described by its designers as a "Renault 5 put on a Land Rover chassis" Development began in 1971, after the 24th Congress of CPSU, where Alexei Kosygin (the then-Premier of the Soviet Union) gave the designers at VAZ and AZLK the task of creating a car suitable for rural areas – for the villagers and farmers of the Soviet Union – since the usual Zhiguli, Moskvitch and Zaporozhets, intended primarily for ordinary people, were not much of use in isolated areas, which made up a large part of the USSR.In the same year, a team of VAZ designers, under Vladimir Solovyev as a chief designer, began competing with AZLK to work on a "civilized" four-wheel drive vehicle.The new car was inspired in part by the IZh-14 prototype of 1974.