Au contraire, they’re some of the best textbooks I’ve had the fortune of reading! :-)

They make the student work (participate actively in your own education), which I’ve noticed that American textbooks (at least modern high school & college textbooks) seem loath to do. I don’t know why — you don’t develop what you don’t exercise!

If you open any soviet textbook you will see the following text on title page: (loosely translated) "Supplementary reading for students of xx specialties higher education" it can school level or college level. But in essence those books are an addition to the course which is mainly delivered by lectures. You can study by yourself but it will be hard and you will need extra material to replace lectures.

Yeah, that's what I said, "poorly written" is a criteria that can be applied to belletristic more than to science text books.

Russian math books have just few words, formulas are the rest. What can be poorly written there?

Kidding :)

Having worked from translations and occasionally originals of some of the Russian texts, they're actually utterly marvelous.

Same situation in Romania, some of the best math problem books I found were a bunch of books printed before 1980's. The problems were just wonderful. I was desperately searching for them for my kids through my father's library.

In 1990's after the revolution we got humanitarian aid from Western Europe, including some French math textbooks. They were so low level (simple) I was in disbelief. Useless.

I had the same reaction in Poland, when my grandfather gave me some textbooks from his collection. They were an order of magnitude better than what I was using at school.

and, somehow, the economic and social system in France is much better than the one in Romania

my take is that the western-style school focuses on getting students life skills, while the eastern-Europe one focuses on cramming knowledge in the brain

Maybe it's also the context, the gradual buildup France had over Romania at the time and now. Romania endured the communist regime for many decades and was very much isolated.

Can you please share some books you enjoyed?

The ones I spent most time with were volumes titled (translated) "Selected problems in higher mathematics." I worked out of a German translation for one volume while I learned a smattering of Russian and then the Russian for a second one. This was to fill in assumed background in things like integration that was assumed by Landau & Lifshitz.

It's been long enough where I have no idea of the author.

What subjects are you after?

Also, the enjoyment was not supposed to be from reading the book, it was from passing the exam.

Not OP, if you know any great English translated Linear Algebra title or statistics.

Unfortunately the ones I know were not translated.