>>It seems to boil down to the matter of profits. On the soviet side, there was none involved, other than boosting the makers' bragging rights and showing off against them capitalists. On the capitalists' side, however, the whole branch is notorious of skimming, making outrageous profits on products which have the clever marketing (consisting of, I guess, strategically allocated bribes, set up demos, and maybe some blackmail) as their most prominent feature.
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>Which explains all those other Russian successful products...
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>Lada, Moskvitch to name just a few.. <s>

You mean the belgian made Lada? :)

Sure, they were bad - in statist socialism consumer satisfaction was solved by delivering anything, so the statistics could show that "we have n thousand of X per 100.000 people", quality didn't matter. They were shoddy, badly designed (except Lada was the car of the year 1967, when it was called Fiat 124), but they were made to last and be easy to repair. A friend of mine had replaced the timing chain of his third-hand Lada in a day. You could do a full engine refurbish on a Trabant also in a day.

The weapons (and space program, for that matter), however, were a different matter, it was the area where the system put its best people and made sure they "understood the importance" of their task and gave them the resources to accomplish it. And there were a few other accidental areas where this worked as well - perhaps a coincidence of having the right people in right places and some competition in these bragging rights. For instance, soviet cameras were great and cheap, with specially good lenses. I've just recently bought, for 20€, a Gelyios (aka Helios) 50mm/2,0 lens that I now use for macro shots, and there was yet another one, a zoom lens of incredible optical strength - I guess it went to 2,8, which is a lot for a zoom - but it sold in front of my nose. Also, they had good mechanical watches.

OTOH, anything where a plastic part was under mechanical stress was pretty much doomed to break soon. I've seen cases when screws were made of metal too soft to bear the strain (and then some other when the screws would outlast the civilization, while other parts broke). Some of these were chinese junk before chinese junk was invented :).